There was good news and bad news for radio stations in this week's JNLR/MRBI audience-survey data. The good news is that there is evidence that people are listening to more different stations than previously.
The bad news is that there is evidence that people are listening to more different stations than previously.
The good/bad balance probably depends on whether you're an established broadcaster or a new one hoping to slip into listeners' consciousness. The free 'n' easy habits of today's promiscuous listener, finger ever-ready to spin the dial for a sweeter tune or a hotter story, pose a special challenge to programmers and advertisers. "Listener loyalty", of the sort archetypally rewarded by those name-this-hour's-lucky-number quizzes, ain't what it used to be. Stations increasingly have to think of short-term payoffs for the 10-minute listener.
What's the evidence for the disloyalty trend? Without getting too statistical about it, it's the difference between the "market share" numbers for all the stations, which by definition have to add up to 100 per cent, and the "listened yesterday" or "reach" figures, which don't. If you listen to a station at all during a given day, it's "reached" you, even if you only give it a small "share" of your listening time.
The "reach" figures rose, often quite dramatically, for a big majority of the State's local stations outside Dublin.
In Dublin, Lite FM was able to come in and grab a 10 per cent share of the audience's listening time, while only having a small effect on the "reach" of the existing stations. Most of Lite's audience, in other words, kept listening to their old stations, but less than they used to. (This, by the way, is exactly how Lite planned it, the clever cats.) "Reach" is a perfectly lovely and legitimate concept precisely because it lets us in on such developments, even if it's slightly more dubious than "share" if you're trying to compare stations.
The stats enter a greyer area, however, when stations start boasting about the listenerships of particular programmes. Again, the fact that so many programmes seem to have increased their total audience is probably more evidence of that promiscuity, but these programme numbers should also come with a health warning: longer shows get a positively steroidal boost to their totals.
Ian Dempsey's Breakfast Show (Today FM, Monday to Friday), for example, has undoubtedly built a healthy audience, but the trumpeted figure that shows it closing in fast on the 2FM competition (177,000 for Dempsey against 199,000 for Damien McCall), ignores the fact that Dempsey lasts an hour longer and so gathers extra numbers in that time. When the shows are head-to-head, 2FM's audience is consistently up to 50 per cent higher. (Incidentally, for the hour after 9 a.m., Marian Finucane (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) hammers Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday) by a similar ratio.)
Today FM's grade-inflation for DJs on long shifts gets pure silly in the afternoon, when it has Philip Cawley's four-hour show, whose audience, the press release this week boasted, could fill Lansdowne Road three times. I don't know anyone who listens to it, do you? Undoubtedly the figure is accurate, but it reflects a lot of short-stay drop-in listening to a show that's on all afternoon. Look more closely at the numbers and it's a rather sadder story: for example, in Co Dublin, the programme is handily beaten from 3 to 5 p.m. by - wait for it - Lyric FM. The phrase "rainy Wednesday night at Tolka Park" springs cruelly to mind.
There's more to radio, obviously, than ratings. But Today FM's numbers are worth dwelling on because of the station's history: when it came on-air as Radio Ireland in 1997, it promised to be a serious, quality alternative to RT╔ Radio 1, in particular. Quickly, however, it became the panic station that had to withdraw its promises in order, we were told, to meet the demands of the marketplace.
What we are left with until 5 p.m. every weekday, filling a prime slot on the national airwaves, is a largely anonymous, low-cost pop station which the marketplace couldn't give a damn about. In every single locality in Ireland, it trails in last place to all the serious commercial competition; in Dublin it's being slaughtered from 9 to 5 by the newcomer, Lite FM, and, as we've seen, it can't even completely hold off under-achieving Lyric FM. While undoubtedly, in the Tiger economy, it's been able to attract advertisers, it will be interesting to see how daytime Today FM copes with the Tiger's droop.
But of course Today FM goes on after 5 p.m., when the old promises still echo around its studios. And what do you know? People listen. Its high-quality post-7 p.m. music shows often scoop a similar or higher percentage of those listening to the radio than its daytime crapfests. But it is Today FM's 5 p.m. switch-on that is truly extraordinary: the quarter-hour figures show its national audience immediately doubles at that time; the increase in Dublin is greater than fivefold.
THE Today FM suits who nearly did away with The Last Word (Monday to Friday) should pray daily (or weekdays anyway) for its continued good health. And listeners may regard the pap that precedes it on the air (which of course we don't listen to anyway) as a small price to pay for this vital addition to our audio pleasure.
This week, in fact, I would even have sampled, say, 10 minutes of Ray D'Arcy if that was required to catch Navan Man's priceless pisstake on Tony Blair flying Ryanair, in a plane piloted by Michael O'Leary spouting inanities and profanities in roughly equal measure. (Surely that was Navan Man repeating the performance on Wednesday's Morning Ireland?)
The summer-substitute presenters of The Last Word have their own charm, too; this silly season, it seemed Matt Cooper was enjoying a few tabloid indulgences. Or trying to, anyway - but he couldn't bring himself even to suggest the gory details of the Hamilton sexual-assault case and when he interviewed Diane, that sex-change woman in Cork, Cooper didn't rise to a single suggestive question, let alone a challenging one.
Indeed, much as I like Cooper, we got an itchy dose this week of his fuzzy liberalism, the sort that happily throws around terms such as "drug-dealing terrorists" to deal with the FARC - though not the more deserving US and Colombian governments - but can't muster up a straightforward word like "mutilation" when talking about sex-change surgery. Instead, Cooper allowed himself to be shot down for even suggesting that Diane had "opted" for the procedure. It was, she said earnestly though absurdly, not an option but a necessity.
It later emerged that one reason the operation was a "necessity" was because the drugs she was taking to suppress male hormones would be dangerous if she took them any longer. Hmm (or should that be Hrr?)
Any sensitive person would sympathise with someone whose gender identity doesn't conform to the dichotomies of our social norms, which clearly fail to recognise the continuum of sexual feelings that our psychology and, it seems, our biology bequeath to us. Given those oppressive norms, perhaps it's even arguably fair that society should pay when someone feels he or she needs medical help to conform. But surely there has to be a better way for us of all to deal with "gender dysphoria" and whatnot than this bizarre chop-and-excavate (or, indeed, close-and-attach) on the fragile human anatomy.
For what it's worth, radio advertising seems happy to plumb the depths of tabloid ignorance to which Matt Cooper won't sink.
Howzabout that bank ad, where the middle-aged couple, above in the bed, reflect on their college-bound son's wise financial choices, and how life without him around the house will be just like the old days. "Except," says the missus, bold as brass, "now we have the camcorder". Ah yes, the smut of everyday life, sans dysphoria, captured α la Sun.
For pure filth, however, I'll take the sausage ad in which a fictitious footballer called Plato is interviewed about his meat preferences. You see, he plays for Athletic Bilbao and is known as "the Butcher of Brazil", heh-heh. So in what "native" language do we hear this Brazilian, playing for a Basque club, expound philosophically on matters porky? Why, in fluent Spanish, whaddelse? Well, that's foreign, isn't it?
hbrowne@irish-times.ie