Radio Format Listening in Latin America

In a previous note, we found that persons between the ages of 12 and 64 in Latin America spend an average of 3.9 hours per day listening to radio. Another way of looking at this is that 16.3% of persons 12-64 in Latin America are listening to radio in a typical moment.  In another note, we found that these listening levels are fairly constant over time.

While this overall level is fairly sizeable, we need to recognize that the listening time has to be distributed among a large number of stations.  In many large Latin American cities, there may be more than 50 radio stations (see Radio Web for a list of radio stations in Buenos Aires and Fred Cantu's Mexico Radio TV Lists for Mexico City).  When 16.3% is divided by 50, the average station rating is a meager 0.33%.

In practice, the radio audience is not divided equally among the stations.  First of all, some stations are more successful than others.  More importantly, radio stations build niche audiences.  That is, their audiences are not seldom representative cross-sections of the general population; rather, they tend to be concentrated in select, identifiable segments (such as males between the ages of 18 and 24).  The radio stations capture their niche audiences by broadcasting programs that appeal to these people.  To attract and retain that audience, radio stations create brand identities by being associated with specific radio formats (such as news, popular music, classical music and so on).

Based upon the Los Medios y Mercados de Latinoamérica 1998 study, here are the most popular radio format types in Spanish-speaking Latin America.  The percentages in parentheses represent the percentages of people who say that they listen regularly to those formats.

  1. News (46%)
  2. Tropical music (44%)
  3. Spanish-language ballads (38%)
  4. Spanish-language popular music (31%)
  5. Sports (24%)
  6. Spanish-language rock music (22%)
  7. English-language pop music (19%)
  8. English-language ballads (16%)
  9. Weather (16%)
  10. English-language rock music (16%)
  11. Commentary/talk (15%)
  12. Classical music (10%)
  13. Traffic (9%)
  14. Advice/opinion (9%)
  15. Country music (7%)
  16. Religious programs (5%)
  17. Jazz music (4%)
  18. Comedy (3%)
  19. Radionovelas (2%)

We note that this classification scheme is imperfect.  For example, 'commentary/talk' may cover a broad spectrum of social and political viewpoints, which are not interchangeable.  As another example, 'rock' may cover a variety of formats whose distinctions are extremely important to their followers.  However, this list is perhaps one that a consumer can understand without getting into the elaborate jargon used in the radio industry (e.g. "adult contemporary hits").  There is some overlap among these basic formats, in the sense that people may listen to one or more of these formats regularly  (e.g. a station may broadcast news, traffic and weather reports).  A factor analysis of these variables created the following groupings:

  1. Popular music --- Spanish-language pop and rock music; English-language pop, rock and ballads
  2. Information --- News, sports, traffic, weather
  3. Exotica --- Classical, country, jazz
  4. Talk --- Commentary/talk, advice opinion
  5. Relaxation --- Spanish-language ballads, comedy, tropical music
  6. Didactic --- Religious programs, radionovelas

The compositions of the radio format audiences by standard demographics are shown in the following table:

Category
     Class		 Popular
Music		 Information Exotica Talk Relaxation Didactic
Sex
     Male
     Female
55%
45%
62%
38%
48%
52%
38%
62%
37%
63%
54%
46%
Age
     12-17
     18-24
     25-34
     35-44
     45-54
     55-64
29%
33%
24%
  9%
  3%
  2%
  9%
13%
24%
24%
19%
11%
21%
23%
19%
18%
11%
  9%
  5%
17%
20%
25%
16%
16%
13%
24%
26%
20%
11%
  6%
16%
21%
21%
21%
14%
  8%
Socio-economic levels
     Level A
     Level B
     Level C
     Level D
15%
30%
30%
25%
10%
21%
26%
44%
17%
30%
27%
26%
13%
25%
30%
32%
22%
36%
35%
13%
  4%
15%
21%
60%

(source: Los Medios y Mercados de Latinoamérica 1998)

On Zona Latina's Radio page, there are currently over 750 links to Latin American radio stations, including quite a few live Internet broadcasters.  These radio stations are not necessarily a representative sample of all Latin American stations.  In fact, they are more likely to be from large cities with good Internet infrastructure (such as São Paulo).   Furthermore, the audience to the Internet live broadcasts may be qualitatively different from the corresponding AM / FM / Mediumwave / Shortwave broadcast audiences.

The odd thing is that the Internet radio audiences may be coming from outside the city of origin; after all, if you live in that city, you can just turn on your radio and listen to the station in hi-fi stereophonic sound instead of listening to the scratchy real audio version.  Therefore, the Internet is a means for a radio station to break out of its broadcast area.  This poses some programming dilemmas, as one has to decide on how to appeal to the Internet audience with essentially local content.  Yet, clearly, the race for the moment is for stations to establish brand values on the Internet, since this is unclaimed territory and the broadcast reputation may not mean much to this audience.

(posted by Roland Soong on 9/13/99)

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