Alpha Boomers: What Their Country Station Might Sound Like

07/16/2011
Posted by: Mike O'Malley
Category: country music, country radio

With “Alpha Boomer” now one of Arbitron’s standard Tapscan demos, I revisited Albright & O’Malley’s Roadmap 2011 (our annual online perceptual of 10,000+ country listeners) to see how the appeal of the various Music Clusters broke out across 25-54 and the 55-64 leading edge Alpha Boomer demo.

The bars below represent the percent of ‘Like a Lot” (highest score) for eight music clusters. The blue bars are the responses from 25-54s, the tan bars 55-64s (for display purposes I selected one of the songs in each cluster to represent the entire segment).

55-64s give the Early Millennial cluster the highest passion score. Alpha Boomers also have a long “era tail” with the Boom and Late 90s music clusters outscoring some more recent millennial clusters.

Still, Roadmap 2011 revealed that the majority of 55-64s are extremely positive about how country music is sounding over the past 12 months. 86% feel country music is as good as or better than it’s been over the past 12 months with 94% listening either the same or more to their local country stations compared to a year ago.

Your mileage of course may vary. Hopefully this inspires you to check into how different segments of your audience respond to your individual music clusters.