Like Night and Day

Connect the dots of the latest Arbitron ratings for morning and afternoon drive and they reveal a picture of listener habits. Probably more often than might be expected, people do not tune to the same stations on the commute home that they do during their morning trek.

In other words, not all of the morning’s Top 10 stations are the afternoon’s Top 10--and even when a station does appear on both lists, it can be at different ends.

Mexican regional music station KSCA-FM (101.9), with deejay Renan Almendarez Coello, is first in the morning with an average quarter-hour audience of 180,500, but the station ranks 10th in the afternoon. At the opposite end of the seesaw, hip-hop music station KPWR-FM (105.9), popular with the teen crowd who tune in after school, is first in the afternoon, with an average of 94,700 listeners tuned to the Baka Boyz. But the station ranks 10th in the morning.

As befits the morning pace--quick, get up, get dressed and get out--listeners on the way to work in the car from 6 to 10 a.m. tend to favor news, weather and traffic, the kind of programming in which they can snatch a laugh, light banter, maybe even a thought or two.

That’s when news station KNX-AM (1070) does the best. It ranks eighth from 6 to 10 a.m. with an average quarter-hour audience of 85,700. But in the afternoon, it sinks to 18th place with an average of 49,100 listeners.

George Nicholaw, KNX’s vice president and general manager, is well aware of what a difference the time of day makes.

“The start of the day, everybody is up and at ‘em,” he says. “They want to know how their day is going to unfold, anything on the horizon that might impact on it. They want to know whether the weather is perfect or not, whether the traffic is going to be a problem, and they want to be informed about what happened after they went to bed at night, so that they’re knowledgeable with [other] people at work.”

Come 3 to 7 p.m., however, people are primarily in the mood to wind down at the end of a hard day’s labor. As former KPWR General Manager Marie Kordus puts it, afternoons are the time for “brain drain. The station has always done better in afternoon drive.”

Consider the Wave, otherwise known as KTWV-FM (94.7), whose soothing moniker mirrors its smooth jazz tone. It ranks fifth during afternoon drive, but only 16th in the morning.

As afternoon drive host Don Burns has suggested, “people connect” to KTWV’s music because “it’s comfortable. It’s not something you have to [ponder]. It’s not Picasso Cubism but Cezanne’s apples. Like that would be wonderful to the eye, this would be to the ear. It’s just there. You don’t think about it.”

Tim Pohlman, KTWV’s vice president and general manager, points out that “it’s not just here in L.A.” that the format does better during afternoon drive, but “across the country. It logically follows that, toward the end of the day, the format is more conducive to relaxing and feeling good and unwinding.”

Oldies station KRTH-FM (101.1) also does somewhat better in the afternoon, ranking ninth compared to morning’s 11th. “There’s tremendous competition in the morning,” notes KRTH’s Vice President and General Manager Pat Duffy. “In the afternoon, people listen to KRTH because it’s a feel-good station. It’s a mood.”

Among listeners 12 and older, the top five stations from 6 to 10 a.m. are KSCA-FM; Spanish adult contemporary station KLVE-FM (107.5); talk station KLSX-FM (97.1); talk station KFI-AM (640); and urban station KKBT-FM (92.3).

The top five in the afternoon are KPWR, KLVE, KKBT, Top 40 station KIIS-FM (102.7) and KTWV.

Clearly, the morning-afternoon contrast does not apply across the board. There is a certain consistency, for example, to classical music station KKGO-FM (105.1), which places 24th in morning drive and 22nd in the afternoon. “Our audience keeps building during the day,” notes Saul Levine, president and general manager. “Maybe because the music is more serious, listeners get in the mood a little later in the day.”

When Are You Listening?: There is an anomaly in the morning and afternoon numbers. According to hour-by-hour Caltrans numbers for 1997, there are 9.6 million cars on the road between 6 and 10 a.m. in Los Angeles and Orange counties--but 12.7 million from 3 to 7 p.m.

Yet morning drive is radio’s prime time--where the biggest audience is and therefore where the biggest bucks are paid, for talent and for commercial time.

If that strikes you as odd--that more cars are on the road on the drive home than left home in the morning--Caltrans traffic engineer Nick Jones explains that “in the morning, it’s almost pure commute,” while at the other end of the day, “people are going out dancing, going to the gym, to the market. The afternoon has everything mixed in.”

So why isn’t afternoon prime time for radio? Because more radios are on in the morning. Arbitron reports that for the first three months of 1998, 2.5 million people were tuned to the radio here in an average quarter-hour between 6 and 10 a.m., while only 2 million were listening from 3 to 7 p.m..

The explanation: Many of those folks turn the radio off and put on the tape deck or CD player.

Who’s Listening Out There?: Rush Limbaugh, now seeing a bump up in the ratings in the wake of the alleged White House scandals, is dissing on air a Talkers magazine survey that reported in March that Dr. Laura Schlessinger had surpassed him in total listenership.

Whether he will now eclipse Schlessinger won’t be evident until the fall, when the next Talkers survey is due.

However, in the never-never land of radio, there can be no exact national audience count--at best only educated estimates. Even Premiere Radio Networks Inc.--syndicator of Dr. Laura and Rush--which recently promised to come up with a true national figure based on Arbitron data, has bowed out.

Kraig Kitchin, Premiere’s executive vice president, explained that Arbitron does not provide 100% coverage of the nation’s smaller radio markets, only approximations. So no one, it seems, can say with absolute authority who’s listening to whom.