While a station's Arbitron ratings are only one measure of how things are going, we've been curious to get the first look at the new 89.3's numbers and today we got the news. One caveat - we weren't operating as the new format for the entire measuring period. For a full book, we have to wait a few months. But, nonetheless, the news is heartening. We had a metro CUME of 170,000, our Average Quarter Hour listening is 9,300 people, and our Time Spent Listening is 6.9 hours per week. Not only is this excellent news for our first book, but the other two metro MPR stations (our news and classical stations) had strong performance, too. Thanks to all of you for listening -- and thank you for telling your friends about us, too!

Today I was in Washington, D.C. and among other things I had an interesting meeting with Jenny Toomey and Jean Cook from the Future of Music Coalition. Here's what their web site says about their mission:

The Future of Music Coalition is a not-for-profit collaboration between members of the music, technology, public policy and intellectual property law communities. The FMC seeks to educate the media, policymakers, and the public about music / technology issues, while also bringing together diverse voices in an effort to come up with creative solutions to some of the challenges in this space.

We talked for quite a while but it seemed like we barely got started on what we had to discuss. If you are interested in such things (which, if you're reading this, you probably are), I'd encourage you to check out FMC's website. You'll see why we're talking about ways we might collaborate.