Audience Measurement
Audience Composition
The demographic, psychographic, or socioeconomic breakdown of a station's listener base, usually expressed in percentages.
What is Audience Composition?
Audience Composition describes who is listening, not how many. A station might report that 62 percent of its audience falls within the 25–54 demographic, 54 percent are female, 48 percent earn above the market median household income, and 31 percent identify as frequent car buyers. Every one of those percentages helps or hurts the station with different advertiser categories.
Composition is the core planning tool for targeted buys. A premium auto dealer looking for affluent 35–64 listeners will ignore raw Cume and go directly to Composition reports to find the station that indexes highest against their target. This is why two stations with identical AQH can command radically different rates: their composition profiles serve different advertiser sets.
Why it matters
Essential for targeted advertising; a luxury automobile dealer requires a station with an audience composition heavily weighted toward high-income earners.
Related terms
- AQH (Average Quarter-Hour Persons)— The average number of individuals tuning into a station for at least five consecutive minutes within a specific 15-minute interval.
- AQH Rating— AQH Persons expressed as a mathematical percentage of the total measured demographic population in a specific geographic market.
- Audience Turnover— The calculated ratio of a station's cumulative audience (Cume) compared to its Average Quarter-Hour (AQH) audience.
- Average Audience— The estimated number of people listening to a radio station or viewing a television program during any given minute of the broadcast.