Handbook of Media Economics, vol 1A

Mediabase, an electronic monitoring service that compiles data on the airplay of contem-

porary music stations. In this data, the start time of each song is recorded, together with

information on whether commercials or recorded promotional material appeared

between the songs. This data allows for a rich analysis of the music that is played, and

provides some measure of the amount of time that individual stations spent on commer-

cials for a large number of hours, where the length of the commercials is imputed from

the time between songs.

Unfortunately, I am unaware of systematic sources of information looking at the use

of syndicated programming, which plays a very important role in political and sports

talk radio, but also provides significant amounts ...