On or around Thanksgiving, programmers traditionally flip the switch and begin a four-week run of holiday tunes while watching their audiences grow steadily before peaking on Christmas Eve.
Last year in the top 48 markets measured by Nielsen, 28.4 million Americans tuned to an “All Christmas” radio station on Dec. 24.
Now, the fact that Christmas music on the radio performs best the night before Christmas shouldn’t surprise, but after digging into the data for the top holiday-format stations in each of those markets last year, a few interesting trends emerged.
First, according to Nielsen, the mid-day daypart (Monday-Friday 10 a.m.-3 p.m.) led the holiday ratings, with listening peaking during the 12 p.m. hour over the four-week stretch from early December to New Year’s. Last year, the audience size during mid-days increased 71 percent from when the stations were not in the All Christmas format.
However, that wasn’t where the most dramatic changes due to holiday music happened. The numbers for the nighttime (defined as Monday-Friday 7 p.m.-midnight) slot were off the charts compared with the normal results after sundown. During the course of the holiday ratings season, nights saw a 129 percent lift and—hold onto your eggnog—a 582 percent lift on Christmas Eve.
To put that last stat in perspective, the normal nighttime average quarter-hour (AQH) audience--the average number of listeners tuned in during a given 15-minute period—on these stations in 2012 was 291,700. On Christmas Eve, it was 1.9 million.
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