“Personalized” radios pay off | The Press

With 1.9 million listeners each week, Cogeco’s 98.5 continues to dominate the French-speaking Greater Montreal market and defend its title as the most listened to radio station in Canada according to the latest spring data from Numeris. .

This represents a 24.1% audience share for the station. This is a 5.7% increase from spring 2022.

Paul Arcand, with Since you have to get upremains the indisputable emperor (he must be tired of the title of king) by obtaining 37.7% of audience share.

With respectively 23.1%, 23.2% and 24.5% in their niche, The Normandeau effect, Without reservation And Quebec now are the station’s other big hits.

For its part, ICI Première sets a new spring viewing record with a share of 16.5%. Given the many changes made to the schedule last fall, public radio management is delighted with these results. Like what, you have to know how to take risks in a big machine like public radio.

The show All one morning, driven by Patrick Masbourian, had the best spring in its history, winning a 21.8% share. This show has come of age. The machine is ultra-oiled, the captain is solid and the team is more united than ever. You can hear it by the many laughs!

Franco Nuovo, at the helm of Draw me a morning, continues to achieve excellent scores on Saturday (24.8%) and Sunday (31.4%). Among the other programs or segments most listened to on ICI Première, we note the 8 a.m. newscast (24.0%), Mathieu Belhumeur, Penelope (18.4%), with Penelope McQuade, and The day (is still young) (17.8%), led by Jean-Philippe Wauthier.

These data, recorded from February 27 to May 28, also reveal that Rythme FM obtains 14.7% market share, while Rouge FM, Énergie and CKOI will obtain respectively 8.8%, 7.4% and 6.7 %.

The efforts put into a rich and varied program on ICI Musique are bearing fruit. Radio-Canada’s music radio saw its share jump from one spring to the next to reach 5.1%. It has the longest music radio listening time in Greater Montreal with a weekly average of 3.7 hours.

Arriving in the Montreal radio landscape in August 2020, WKND is making a slow but steady rise to obtain a 2.9% market share. Will the changes to the fall grid move the needle further? To be continued !

As we can see, stations that broadcast programs with a strong personality bring in a lot. For too long, the musical radios based on the recipe of a marriage between the Top 40 and comedians worked well. But is the public tired of these boilerplate concepts? The numbers seem to prove it.

In the Montreal market, radio stations Rythme, Rouge, Énergie, CKOI and now WKND give the impression of wanting to target the same two audiences: young people and women. Slices of pie seem to be more and more difficult to make profitable in a cosmopolitan market like Montreal. We must not forget that young people also listen to English-language radio stations such as Virgin or The Beat.

The owners of these stations should perhaps consider the energy that would have to be spent to build niches that have a specificity with solid hosts and hostesses. Survey after survey, we realize that 98.5 and ICI Première, which offer quality “spoken” content, are still the winners.

We see the same thing in other markets, such as Quebec, where ICI Première has been the most listened to radio station for several seasons.

I’m not saying that commercial music radio should all disappear. Rythme FM, a radio station that offers a good balance between music and spoken content, managed to place five of its programs in the top twenty most listened to programs. I say there may be too many. And that a lazy way of doing things has set in over time.

In a context where music and song are offered by all kinds of means, we must find new ways to make them discover and exploit them (Here Music is a good example of this desire).

Nor am I saying that we should only do talk radio to Montreal. But when we do, let’s manage to add value.

One thing is certain, Montrealers love to listen to the radio. All the more reason to take care of this medium about which we have often written a death notice. At the risk of repeating myself, the radio is aging well. It does not have to face the storms bravely traversed by newspapers and television.

She should take the opportunity to spread her wings even more!