Triton Digital will measure Pandora's national and local audience using the more-traditional AQH and cume metrics as part of their new MRC-accredited Triton Webcast Metrics Local report, the companies announced in a joint press release this morning. Triton also released local Pandora audience ratings for March 2012.
The ratings show Pandora with an AQH rating of 1.0-1.2 for nearly all of the markets among A18-34s. Among A18-49s, the company's rating falls between 0.7 and 0.9. Pandora's cume ratings range between 22 and nearly 29 among A18-34s (the top market being San Francisco with a cume rating of 28.7), while among A18-49s the cume rating falls between 15 and nearly 21.
In a typical major market Arbitron report, in a demo like A18-34, the top-rated broadcast station might have about a 0.7 AQH rating (which would equate to about a 9.0 share in the demo).
Pandora writes in its press release: "The national results for March 2012 show that among adults 18-49 Pandora has a weekly cume of 23,874,175, which is equivalent to a cume rating of 17.8 and, when compared to radio networks in Arbitron's March 2012 RADAR 112 report, makes Pandora the largest adult 18-49 radio network in the U.S."
Pandora CRO John Trimble commented, "The new Triton reports are a great step forward for the radio industry and satisfy the growing demand for an apples-to-apples, third-party measurement solution for terrestrial and Internet radio."
You can find the companies' press release here and the March report for Pandora here (PDF).
RAIN ANALYSIS: Triton's ratings show Pandora continuing its AQH growth among A18-49 from the figures released in December 2011 by Edison Research and Pandora (see the charts below). The ratings suggest that Pandora is the #1 consumer brand of radio in almost every one of the top 10 markets, (in the sense that 'Kiss 109' is a consumer brand but 'Clear Channel' or 'Cumulus' are not).
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Pandora's network claims
I don't mind or care whatever Pandora is and can actually document that it is. But I take umbrage at their continued use and twisting of data to which they don't subscribe to support claims that that data doesn't actually support.
If Pandora is calling its aggregation of millions of individual streams a network (which is fine), then why are they comparing that network to the customized "streams" of other networks rather than to the networks themselves? The Premiere Network reaches more than 7 times as many 18-49 year olds as Pandora. Dial-Global is many multiples of Pandora as well. The data published and copyrighted on Arbitron's site doesn't list the ratings for the networks, only for customized configurations of those networks. These are akin to Pandora offering something customized by gender, age and registration data. That customized set certainly would not have the "ratings" P is claiming for all adults 18-49. So Pandora is comparing itself to one customized targeted segment of the Premiere Network, not to the network itself. Its claim to be the biggest radio network is ludicrous and unsupportable.
I wish Pandora would just be what it is rather than trying to use compromised data to prove it is something that it isn't. If their product is good and does so well, why are they so desperate that they have to keep making false claims?