Friday, July 24, 2009

No, not a purple people eater - although it's possible that it could resurrect the purple people eater

There are people who work in the recording industry, and their job is to serve YOU. They use advanced measurement techniques, as well as extensive industry experience, to figure out the songs that YOU like and to play them for YOU.

But what would happen if they asked you what you liked? Enter the purple people eater - whoops, I mean the Portable People Meter.

At the opening of this year's Musexpo conference in London, a heated argument broke out when manager Jazz Summers declared that "all US radio is shit". Jimmy Steal, VP of programming for LA radio station Power106fm and New York's Hot97, didn't take the accusation sitting down. Later on, Steal told me about an invention starting to be used in the US, which could change music programming profoundly: Arbitron's Portable People Meter (PPM)....

[T]he PPM is a mobile phone-sized device that consumers wear throughout the day. It works by detecting signals embedded in the audio portions of transmissions. It detects what you listen to on the radio, what you watch on broadcast, cable and satellite TV, what media you stream on the internet, and what you hear in stores and entertainment venues. At the end of the day, the survey participant places the PPM in a base station that recharges it and sends the information to a hub that transmits it to Arbitron.

Of course, they could get some of this information for me by checking my scrobbles - but I digress. And actually, it can detect something that can't:

The information it collects is so specific that it can report if a listener switches stations in the middle of a song. This is the part that is of utmost importance to music programmers.

Well, you can measure all of this stuff, but how do you interpret the measurements?

Steal says he's concerned that it could be detrimental to new music, since it can sometimes take people a while to warm to a new artist or song. When radio stations use the PPM to determine what songs should remain on their playlists, new artists could be taken off the air before they even have a chance to make an impression.

Of course, it could work the other way around. When the purple people eater detects that someone switches off The Big Hit That's Been Around For Three Months Already, perhaps that will send valuable data to the surveyers.
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