MARKET-STRUCTURE, PROGRAM DIVERSITY, AND RADIO AUDIENCE SIZE

This paper examines the relationships among radio station listenership , the number of program formats, and the number of stations. These rel ationships are statistically significant and consistent with theory, b ut the interrelationships are numerically small. The results imply tha t proposals by the Federal Communications Commission and Congress to r elax ownership restrictions must induce substantial changes in station numbers in order to noticeably increase programming diversity. Merely modest changes in these numbers will have only small diversity effect s. The paper's results also imply that merely mandating the number of formats in a market may not be in the interests of listeners.