The Spring Arbitrons have been released and the competition for the ears of Erie is more heated than ever. Long gone are the days of the near 20 share of audience celebrated by Star 104. In this latest book Star is tied for 1st place with Classy 100 in Total Persons 12+ for the entire broadcasting week. The big story is the blasting of Bob, with WXBB losing almost half of its audience in the year since its debut in early 2007. Last spring Bob was tops 12+; this spring he tied for 4th with Country 98, who beat The Wolf handily. And will somebody put a fork in the 1330 signal?!?! The once glorious home of WRIE has not been a factor on Erie radio in decades.

In fact, the story of this book if the trends hold up is that there really aren’t enough Classic Rock, Country, and Sports listeners to support two stations each in those formats. Hopefully our operators will get that someday and we might see a Smooth Jazz, Real Oldies, or FM Talk station eventually.

Finally, it was actually somewhat of a weird book, with stations in Ashtabula, Warren, Meadville, and Southern Ontario showing up. That usually means that folks south of I-90 got a bunch of diaries. Still the sample is such that it is a good estimate of where listeners lie. Now if we could just get the advertisers excited again about terrestrial radio!

UPDATED: The ratings are available on RadioandRecords.com (no registration required).