This Week with...Arbitron?

Arbitron this week announced the availability of Houston ratings on a weekly basis! Weekly! Ratings! This is all part of Arbitron's testing of the Personal People Meter (PPM), which is their new electronic method of gathering ratings data.

According to Arbitron's news release,

“Instead of waiting as long as a month for a ratings report that only reflects the average audience for the previous three months, radio station executives will now have a single week of reliable audience ratings to see how a programming strategy is working,” said Gary Marince, vice president, Programming Services and Development, Arbitron Inc.

Fascinating stuff. Stations will, for the first time ever, find out in detail if certain long held beliefs are true. Big concert coming to town? A week-long ticket blow out should be great for TSL, right? Weekly ratings should be able to tell us. Do listeners change their habits when their favorite jock is on vacation? Well, let's look at the weekly ratings. Hell, let's shuffle our lineup for a couple of weeks and see what happens. Oh, and we were thinking about broadening our playlist. Let's try it for a week and go from there.

We knew that the PPM was going to shake things up, but the inclusion of weekly ratings is going to cause an earthquake.