A lengthy profile at Bloomberg.com proclaims Delilah "the queen of FM Radio".
She’s carried nightly on 171 radio stations in North America, usually from 7 p.m. to midnight. Her syndicator, iHeartMedia, also streams the show online in a loop. Eight million people listen at least once a week, according to iHM. At any given moment, hundreds of thousands are tuned in. There’s nothing else like it in radio: a nationwide evening call-in that mixes talk and music. In February, Delilah celebrated her 56th birthday and 20 years in syndication.
Yet for all her success, Delilah is fighting to hold her place, reports Bloomberg. Trends in radio have turned sharply against her. Adult contemporary, the format for almost all of her carriers, has gone into decline, with programmers preferring newer, more up-tempo music—less Fleetwood Mac and more Katy Perry. From 2007 to last year, the number of adult contemporary stations fell from 660 to 600. Soft adult contemporary, the even milder variant, lost more than half its stations, dropping from 242 to 115. Many of the remaining AC stations have cut back on DJ talk, filling the time with music and, in some cases, abandoning Delilah’s show. Between format changes and drops, she’s lost more than 50 carriers from her peak of 225 in 2008.
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Barbara Bridges, program director at WJXA Mix 92.9 FM in Nashville, carried Delilah for 15 years before she dropped the show in 2013, three years after Portable People Meters came to the market. “We saw ups and downs that we suffered through in diary,” Bridges says of Delilah’s ratings, “but when it got to PPM, there were more downs than ups.”
Delilah, however, insists that her listeners never went away. PPM sample sizes, she says, are too small, and the device itself is faulty. She’s not alone in saying this. “She’s collateral damage,” says consultant Richard Harker, a vocal critic of PPM.
In many markets, he contends, there aren’t enough meters running to be reliable. For an evening show like Delilah’s, as few as six meters can represent her listeners. “Just one disappearing is 17 percent of your audience,” he says. Nielsen, in an e-mailed statement, said PPM “yield statistical reliability … that is comparable to and in most instances better than the reliability from the former diary.” The Media Rating Council, the industry-funded organization that reviews ratings methods, has accredited PPM in 26 of 48 markets, a fact that both sides of the debate use as ammunition.
“I’m going to stand my ground,” she says. “I’m not stupid. I’m not going to blow up my career and break a promise to my listeners because somebody’s having a knee-jerk reaction to a piece of machinery.”
Still, she has made concessions. In 2013, Premiere began offering stations a “segmented” version of her show that allowed them to select the songs that weren’t caller dedications. This way they can insert more of the upbeat tunes that PPM rewards. There are now five editions of the show: custom versions for New York and Houston, the primary that most stations get, a Christian version, and the segmented shows.
In January, Delilah signed a new multiyear deal with Premiere. iIHeartMedia’s Julie Talbott, Premiere's president of content and affiliate services, declined to say for how much or how long. “I could drive myself crazy trying to analyze that,” she says of the PPM controversy, “but the most important thing for us is we know the power of the Delilah brand.”
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