Satellite Radio added to Arbitron Ratings Survey

Billboard Radio Monitor: Arbitron will begin reporting Satellite Radio listenership as part of their syndicated ratings survey, beginning with the Fall 2005 survey. All satellite radio channels will be eligible, but only to those channels that have enough of an audience to meet their minimum reporting standards. So the traffic channels are out I guess.

But since there’s no call letters for each channel, Arbitron has come up with an alternative naming convention: XM Satellite Radio will begin with the characters “XM” plus the channel number. Sirius Satellite Radio will begin with the characters “XS” plus the channel number. (“SI” couldn’t work? Talk about a branding nightmare)

In Fall 2004, Arbitron said satellite radio appeared in about 1.2 percent of all diary entries. Since then, the number of satellite radio subscribers has grown to 6.2 million.