April 23 - May 20 ("May") ratings

[CAwasinNJ]

As things began to settle down this ratings period I noticed a few things. There's a movement nationwide of talk stations trending down along with AC while classic rock and classic hits are doing well. This makes sense to me. I speculate that talk stations went up previously as listeners searched for information on COVID-19. There isn't a whole lot of new information now, so the talk stations lost ground. In SLC talk was down across the board. So where did they go? I think it's a pretty fair assumption that the type of office workers who have been working remotely might tend to gravitate toward the classic hits, classic rock or even hot AC stations at home that they would not be allowed to play in the office for fear of not being "work safe". Gains in those formats were definitely reflected in this ratings period while AC was down. The one outlier is Easy 99.1 which has remained highly stable through all of this which surprises me.

[seattlefollower]

In my market, listenership overall is down (about 40% from normal). The big "winner" was a hybrid classic and contemporary rock station. They usually do well with men, so it could be that because 'essential' workplaces like warehouses remained in operation, those stations got a lift. (I had a friend that worked in a warehouse and I believe they could only choose from the above mentioned station or a mainstream A/C)

In the cluster where I work, our news/talk station was actually very highly rated as was the market's public news station, although the latter did take a bit of a hit from normal.

The country and CHR stations are down a bit and the one "in office/car safe" rock format we have was down, which the programmers attributed to the same reason CAwasinNJ mentions, being dependent on drive time listenership.

Despite having little to no sports available to cover, our sports station is actually doing quite solidly and not seeing any ratings decline during this time.