Nielsen Audio

I don't know about no value, but much less value.

You are KQRS today in October 2026, and you killed off Arbitron.

You do not belong to Arbitron.

No one advertising knows what your ratings are because you don't want anyone to know how bad they are,

presumably.

Yeah, they don't have any ratings, I guess.

You wouldn't get rid of Arbitron if you did.

Yeah, I don't know.

I have spent my career in various different parts of the industry working for different types of companies.

I worked for Arbitron, the radio ratings company, for a while.

I worked at Urban One.

I worked at Reach Media for a while.

They do a combination of phone and online 24-hour recall.

In, in a lot of ways, a lot like the old diary that, uh, we used to do with Nielsen and Arbitron.

So just out of curiosity, we wanted to see if we compared Nielsen and Eastland numbers in a major market, and randomly we picked Chicago.

It's number three market, big market, should have a pretty good database, and we wanted to see what the results would be when we compared Nielsen to Eastland, and it's kind of interesting.

So [laughs] they're, they're not pushing, they're not pushing that number.

But you know what's interesting, Jackson, about the difference between Nielsen and Eastland is that Nielsen has had forever a very, very strong ad agency sales staff.

Arbitron had, uh, both a really good strong station sales staff and a sta- and a separate s- organization that sold their services to the ad agencies.

So Nielsen bought Arbitron, they bought all those people.

And one of the reasons for this was, and I found some, uh, later 1970s c- uh, corroboration in this from stations in the Midwest, including Chicago's WLS-FM and Los Angeles' KMET.

And one of the reasons they focused on October was the fact that this is when the Arbitron ratings, uh, were often measured.

The autumn sweeps were, were very, very important going into the holiday season and all that.

So they came up with this idea of Rocktober.

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak Somewhere in this town See me and the boys we don't like it So we'll get nothing going now Hiding low looking right to left The scene's full and I think it's best To move away do you hear what I say Come on, come on Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak Somewhere in this town Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak Don't you be around Tonight there's gonna be trouble Some of us won't survive See the boys and me mean business Busting out dead or alive I can hear the hound dog on my tail All hell break loose around the top of twelve Like the game you can lose Or to jail Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak Somewhere in this town Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak Don't you be around Tonight there's gonna be trouble Gonna find myself in love Tonight there's gonna be trouble Hope I understand you So yeah, Thin Lizzy.

And it also makes sense that it would originate in the 70s when FM radio was kind of at its peak in the mid 70s.

And also that these Arbitron ratings were going on.

So it looks pretty much like that's the origin of the event.

What is the diary? What is that? Is that the same thing?

Well, um, actually, back in the day, my day, um, it was Arbitron.

Nielsen eventually bought them.

Uh, but we'll just say it's the same thing.

I might, like, if it, if I know it's not gonna take long, I'll, I'll usually do it because I wanna give them a good rating.

But-

The, the, the only time you got a call from, uh, Arbitron was, um, to ask you to send your diary in.

You know, it'd been a month later-

ugh.

Or some stations like KQ, you wouldn't know the share because they got rid of Arbitron.

But that's a story for another day.

Is

Yeah.

Because they don't take, I would say they might have a minus share.

Well, nobody gets rid of Arbitron unless you're taking it in the

shorts.

I don't know the exact number.

They make it hard to know because Arbitron and people like that now, it's so expensive.

You've got stations in markets they won't even subscribe anymore.

Wow.

Look, Sirius isn't like traditional radio.

Traditional radio has Arbitron ratings, or Nielsen ratings, I guess, is what it's officially called now.

No one knows how many people are listening to SiriusXM.

It's all in-house.

Look, Sirius isn't like traditional radio.

Traditional radio has, you know, Arbitron ratings or whatever, P- People Meter or whatever it's called now.

Nielsen ratings, I guess, is what it's officially called now.

But no, no one knows how or how many people are listening to SiriusXM.