Airplay Live Overview
Every play adds another real-world listener signal
Airplay Live turns real audience movement into continuous music research. Every five seconds, it reads the station’s concurrent online listener count and tracks how the audience moves while each song is playing.
Most of that movement has nothing to do with the song. Airplay Live accounts for the station’s normal background audience movement and asks a simpler question: did more or fewer listeners leave than would normally be expected?
The remaining song-associated signal becomes the station-specific POP Score (0–100), updated after every play. Higher scores mean stronger listener hold. The score is an index, not a percentage.
The Sample
A song aired 20 times is measured around 800 times. Most tune-outs are natural listener movement, just over a fifth comes from the song itself.
Average song length 3:32 · Active reference stations
The Room and the Song
One play could be chance. Across a song’s first 12 plays, the pattern holds: most observed tune-outs come from the room, not the song.
Catalog average · 14.3M audience observations · all measured stations · song’s own signal ~20% of gross
Dataset updated September 20, 2026 at 2:07 AM UTC
Where It Fits
Airplay monitoring shows what was played. Ratings estimate how many listened. Survey research measures what listeners say about songs. Airplay Live measures what the audience does while they air.
It complements familiarity, likability and fatigue research. It cannot test unplayed songs, measure reasons to tune in, or explain why any individual listener left.
Use it to identify strong holders, flag rotation risks and monitor new songs as evidence builds.
What It Represents
POP Score reflects the station’s online-stream audience. It is not a market rating, a demographic study or a measure of the full terrestrial audience.
Airplay Live observes changes in the concurrent audience count; it does not identify or follow individual listeners.
It answers one operational question: When this song plays here, does it hold the online audience better or worse than the surrounding audience environment would suggest?
Programming judgment makes the decision. Airplay Live adds observed behavior.
SETUPA reliable concurrent listener count and a now-playing feed. No station-side installation, no panel, no encoding.
Measuring Talk
Ref station · GuerrillaThe same measurement framework extends to talk breaks, newscasts, stop sets and other identifiable on-air content.
Spoken content is transcribed and grouped into recurring topics and mentions. Segments under 30 seconds are excluded, and qualifying topics receive a station-specific Topic Score scaled from 0 to 100.
More about talk break measurement in Topic Scoring →
Reference stations are shown for demonstration only. No partnership or endorsement implied.
Additional Analysis & Tools
Including
- Detailed online listening analysis using 5-second audience data and listening curves.
- Performance breakdowns by genre, era and other relevant song characteristics.
- Extended POP comparison by daypart, with scheduling suggestions where the data supports them.
- Automatic Mood & Energy scoring and comparison when station metadata is unavailable.
- Inactive View to identify strong-performing tracks that may have been paused, overlooked or rotated out.
- Stamina identifies the small subset of tracks with enough long-term evidence to qualify as proven, steady choices for rotation.
- An example Music and Talk report.
Live demos: Music · Dance UK | Talk · Radio Guerrilla, Bucharest