Fresh data changes radio's numbers game

There was punk aplenty at Saturday's opening show of KROQ-FM's two-night Almost Acoustic Christmas bill at Gibson Amphitheatre. The lineup was dominated by the 200 mph music, from headliner the Offspring down through Chicago's Rise Against and Southern California's own AFI and Slightly Stoopid. Even Stone Temple Pilots, with singer Scott Weiland back in the fold after his vitriolic breakup earlier this year with Velvet Revolver, and hard rock band Staind, though neither is classically punk, played brash, loud and snotty enough to fit right in.

Punk's smash-the-rule-book ethos has manifested itself in KROQ's program lineup in recent weeks with program director Kevin Weatherly's decision to hack off a chunk of the "Kevin and Bean" morning show and toss them into the afternoon for an hour each day at 5 p.m. The move is a gamble, one that has ticked off some listeners and confused others, but it's an attempt to respond to the ratings-tracking revolution underway in the radio industry.

" 'Kevin and Bean' is our most popular show," Weatherly said. "Now we're finding we have as many listeners at 5 in the afternoon as we do at 7 in the morning, but we were seeing [the ratings] start to fall off some at 9 a.m. . . . This is introducing them to a whole new audience at the end of the day. A lot of people never tune in the morning, and now they're asking, 'Who are these guys?' "

The shake-up in the KROQ program lineup can be traced to the arrival in Los Angeles of Arbitron's Portable People Meter method of measuring radio listenership. PPM has been rolled out in 10 markets across the country, including Los Angeles as of August, presenting the potential to bring as significant a change in the radio world as the 1991 arrival of SoundScan did within the record industry.

SoundScan replaced the reporting of record sales by store owners or employees with precise figures of products physically scanned at cash registers. PPM swaps the old diaries that selected listeners filled out manually with devices that detect and monitor radio signals in the cars, homes and workplaces of people who have been targeted by Arbitron to be statistically representative.

"It's causing people to reevaluate everything," Weatherly said, because PPM provides far more detailed, hour-by-hour tracking of a station's audience, feedback that is delivered monthly instead of quarterly under the old diaries, which were only as accurate as the user's memory.