News/Talk dominates fall airwaves

The dominant format in the 92 continuously-measured Arbitron radio markets is the News/Talk/Sports family, which far and away leads all comers and significanly improved on its own performance over the course of a year, aided greatly by another hotly-contested election. According to a study released by Interep, stations in the format group claimed 18% of the audience in the Fall 2004 Arbitron books, compared to 16.6% in Fall 2003, and well ahead of the 12.3% of listening which went to Hispanic stations.

Urban and CHR had 10.9% and 10.6% for third and fourth place, repectively, followed by AC at 9.9%. If Hot AC's 3.3% is added to the mainstream variety, however, its share would jump to 13.2%, good for second place.

Below are totals for all format groups. The chart is from Interep based on Arbitron Fall 2003 and 2004 12+ results.

Format	Fall 2003	Fall 2004
News/Talk/Sports	16.6	18
Spanish	11.5	12.3
Urban	10.6	10.9
CHR	11.1	10.6
AC	10	9.9
Country	8.3	8.4
Classic Rock	5.8	5.6
Oldies	4.9	4.5
New Rock	4.7	4.4
AOR	3.5	3.3
Hot AC	3.1	3.3
Smooth Jazz	3.1	2.9
Standards	1.9	1.4
Classical	1.4	1.3
Black Gospel	1.2	1.2
Contemp Christian	0.9	0.8
Religious	0.5	0.6
Ethnic	0.3	0.2
Easy	0.1	0.1
Christian Ctry	0.1	0.1
Children's	0.1	0
Variety/Other	0	0