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Ethnic Listening to LA Radio Stations

DavidEduardo

DavidEduardo

Moderator/Administrator
Staff member
Here is a taste of data on the ethnic (Black and Hispanic) listening to some interesting stations in LA:

StationBlack percent AQHHispanic Percent AQH
KBIG239
KCBS447
KDAY1667
KFI823
KFSH1256
KIIS558
KJLH815
KKGO08
KLAC934
KLOS135
KNX2637
KOST343
KPFK2739
KPWR2857
KROQ140
KRRL2171
KRTH240
KTWV5422
KYSR166

This is the percentage of the AQH audience that comes from each of the two measured and weighted ethnic groups. Nielsen does not quantify "Asian" as an ethnic group, so you will find all ethnic and cultural groups not included in Black and Hispanic to be in "Other" which means non-Hispanic whites, Asians, Arab/Middle Eastern, etc.
 
54 per cent Black AQH for KTWV, despite not really being an Urban AC? (In the Air Tonight, Dreaming of You, and Unwritten never charted on the R&B charts, as far as I know. But KTWV plays all these songs.)

66 per cent Latino AQH for KYSR is very high when you consider that Latinos, especially foreign-born immigrants, have a preference for rhythmic music.

Also very surprising to see the stats for KPFK and KFSH. (They are not high-rated stations, but still...)
 
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Ouch at KKGO. I’m surprised country is as popular among whites in LA as it is to make KKGO do as well as they do overall.
 
101tm said:
Ouch at KKGO. I’m surprised country is as popular among whites in LA as it is to make KKGO do as well as they do overall.
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Yet KKGO has roughly the same cume as KDAY, despite KDAY being a class A station. (The KDEY signal targets the Inland Empire.)

Really, you can only get so much of the conservative OC crowd.
 
TheBigA said:
I'm fascinated by the high minority listenership to KPFK. Almost 70%!

Also smiled at the 0% of blacks who listen to KKGO. No surprise there.
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Wait! I thought getting Kane Brown and Jimmie Allen on the radio was going to change all those old biases!
 
CTListener said:
Wait! I thought getting Kane Brown and Jimmie Allen on the radio was going to change all those old biases!
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I don't think this is a bias... more a cultural heritage of what people were exposed to in their youth.
 
victorres43 said:
Also very surprising to see the stats for KPFK and KFSH. (They are not high-rated stations, but still...)
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I included them simply because they are unique stations and interesting to observe. For the same reason, I skipped many other stations.
 
Note... this is not the most recent Nielsen book. I picked one a few months back so as to respect current confidential data. I just thought that some of this information gives us an interesting perspective of how minorities use radio.

We're going to soon see some initiative to add "Non-Binary" to the gender options, and probably some enumeration of Asians. The problem with "Asian" is that there are many, many languages and at least 6 or 7 that are very common in the US... and Nielsen does not currently have the staff and software to deal with more than the two most used languages.
 
Radiomusik said:
Curious what could be the black percentage of listening to KXOL?
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96% Hispanic, 0% Black. All Spanish language stations show a couple of percent that are not Hispanic but that is usually due to a mixed Hispanic-Non Hispanic household not being classified as such. There are some "Hispanics" who do not like the terms "Hispanic" or "Latina/o" because they identify with a nation, not a category like that. In particular, there are Spanish speaking Hispanics who have become very annoyed by the "Latinx" term and don't want to be identified within a broader group of any kind.

Many times I have mentioned one of my daughters who has a T-Shirt that says,

Not Hispanic
Not Latina
Puerto Rican

So take any statistics that measure Hispanic populations and their tastes and preferences with a degree of caution.
 
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I wonder how OTHER ethnic/nationalities etc are represented in LA Radio. I can remember [and David probably does to] of all the ethnic programming that was available on Cleveland airwaves for Germans/Hungarians/Polish/etc. Up until late 70s/early 80s....not sure when they flipped to WZZP.....but WXEN 106.5 seemed to be a hodgepodge of different language programs as well as some stations at the far left of the dial. I distinctly remember going over to friend's homes whose parents/grandparents were from the "old country" and they made it a point to tune in to the station to hear music and other stuff they grew up with. And who can forget Polka Varities on WEWS-TV Sunday afternoons? Eventually syndicated across the country.
 
Yabadabado1 said:
I wonder how OTHER ethnic/nationalities etc are represented in LA Radio. I can remember [and David probably does to] of all the ethnic programming that was available on Cleveland airwaves for Germans/Hungarians/Polish/etc. Up until late 70s/early 80s....not sure when they flipped to WZZP.....but WXEN 106.5 seemed to be a hodgepodge of different language programs as well as some stations at the far left of the dial. I distinctly remember going over to friend's homes whose parents/grandparents were from the "old country" and they made it a point to tune in to the station to hear music and other stuff they grew up with. And who can forget Polka Varities on WEWS-TV Sunday afternoons? Eventually syndicated across the country.
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One of my earlier jobs at WJMO was running the board for the Sunday ethnic block. It ran 6 AM to noon, with hours including Hungarian, Italian, Greek, German and Polish. The shows included large staffs and they all took typical food with them... which they demanded to share with me.

In LA, there are stations or blocks of time in Farsi, Armenian, Chinese (Mandarin), Tagalog, Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese and several others. There are full stations just in Farsi, Mandarin, Korean and Vietnamese.
 
This confirms several of the trends that David said previously, Hispanics do not consume content from their native language, and their consumption is Rhythmic products. This is a clear sign of adoption and a call for all those who are in the Spanish radio business.
 
exbloguero said:
This confirms several of the trends that David said previously, Hispanics do not consume content from their native language, and their consumption is Rhythmic products. This is a clear sign of adoption and a call for all those who are in the Spanish radio business.
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It's always been known that people tend to stick with the music that they grew up on. If they came from Latin America as adults, they will generally always prefer the music they listened to in their country of birth.

Of course, many stations in Latin America play English language pop, CHR, AC and rock music, so some immigrants will already like that when they arrive. But those tend to be from bigger cities and from middle and upper income families... who don't tend to be those who arrive in the Southwest of the United States.

It's the second generation that starts to adopt purely English language music.

It will take 40 years or more with no migration for the need for Spanish language radio (and streaming services) to be totally eliminated. Just in the last 2 years we have seen somewhere around 5 million new arrivals, so that is not happening soon.

Few people fully change their tastes in music after living here even for many years.
 
Yabadabado1 said:
I wonder how OTHER ethnic/nationalities etc are represented in LA Radio. I can remember [and David probably does to] of all the ethnic programming that was available on Cleveland airwaves for Germans/Hungarians/Polish/etc. Up until late 70s/early 80s....not sure when they flipped to WZZP.....but WXEN 106.5 seemed to be a hodgepodge of different language programs as well as some stations at the far left of the dial. I distinctly remember going over to friend's homes whose parents/grandparents were from the "old country" and they made it a point to tune in to the station to hear music and other stuff they grew up with. And who can forget Polka Varities on WEWS-TV Sunday afternoons? Eventually syndicated across the country.
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I can remember WZAK on 93.1 being brokered ethnic as late as 1979.
 
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