The radio industry’s primary rating racket says it has to re-compute its ratings for last fall in the Orlando, Florida market. It’s not quite clear just how the error was found, but it’s not the first time this has happened: Tampa’s Party Pirate made the books in his market back in the late ’90s, and such blips have actually happened on and off for decades.
However, given the fact that Arbitron feels compelled to re-write “the book” for a pretty significant market, based on the listenership of one pirate station, is a pretty big accomplishment, and seems to confirm the hypothesis that free radio is alive and well today. One look at the FCC’s enforcement statistics for the state (and especially the Miami and Orlando metro areas, especially during the fall months of ’08) makes this a somewhat unsurprising development.
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