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Three Minute Update – Format Edition

May 15, 2025

For those of you keeping score at home, last week’s missive compared Q1 2024 with Q1 2025 to see how the change in Nielsen’s reporting procedures affected radio listening. We covered six demos across all the major dayparts. If you missed that one, there will be a link at the end of this article.

This time we are once again teaming up with the wizards from XTRENDS to see how the new rules affected different formats. We focused on total week and Adults 18-49 and 25-54. The data was compiled from 48 of the 49 PPM markets. We also list how many stations were included in each format group.

Here’s the chart:

And, here are a few observations:

  • When Nielsen released their 6+ comparison of Q4 2024 with Q1 2025 the Sports format actually decreased. Sports radio is one of the formats most impacted by seasonality. The good news for the format is that when you look at year-over-year the format was up quite significantly. We also note a larger increase with P18-49 than P25-54.
  • News/Talk was also a big winner. This makes sense as we had a new administration take control in January 2025. This format had the largest cume increase in both demos.
  • Country did not fare as well as several other music formats. It was up but not as dramatically as CHR, Classic, or Rock.
  • The format with the largest increase in AWTE – with both demos – was Religious.
  • Urban saw the lowest percentage increase of all the formats.

Keep in mind that while we compared similar time frames, this is not a strict apples-to-apples comparison. Market and weather conditions varied from year to year and the 2025 panel was not the same as the one that was installed in 2024.

This is also an overall average. It is useful to use this as a comparison to how your station performed in this brave new ratings world.

As always, The Ratings Experts from RESEARCH DIRECTOR, INC. are here to help you make sense of all this data.

Thank you – again – to our friends at XTRENDS for making this all possible.

You can find our day part & demo comparisons here: https://researchdirectorinc.com/2025/05/three-minute-update/

-Steve Allan, Programming Research Consultant

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