Big Market Rock Sign Ons - What's UP

This past week we've seen Clear Channel in Philly flip it's rumba/Hispanic station to somewhat library based Alternative stations Radio 104.5 and in San Francisco CBS dumps talk Free FM for a Classic Hits format with the old KFRC call letters. In Philly you can check out the station at http://www.radio1045.com/.

Why would these groups jump into rock based formats in Major markets? Just a few years ago Clear Channel was moving rock signals into Hispanic formats - is there a taco under your chair? And when CBS lost Howard most of the rock leaning stations quickly left the music behind for talk. We've all seen the trend of rock declining over the last 5-7 years in ratings so we have to wonder why?

PPM is the answer. Rock shares seem very likely to increase as we now see the initial data coming out from Houston and Philly. You can read more in my PPM review on the McVay web site here. I also just finished a piece for the site that digs much deeper into the potential for Rock formats in the PPM world read it here. This is going to be a BIG trend in the top 10 markets over the next 2 years and we could very well see a revival of rock formats in all the top 30 markets over the next 5 years. PPM different sample methods and systems compiled with the meter automatically recording listening instead of relying on recall and writing it down seems to be finding a lot more shares for Rock formats.

In Philly WMMR's shares are up 84%. Now we have to wonder - how far off is the diary system? We look these topics and more in the report the McVay Media site. Hope you can check it out.

Have a great weekend.