Figure 1

The meter recovers a pre-labelled off-format group it was never shown

Per-track production scores on the 0–100 scale for every eligible track on a legacy station (archived known-groups case). One group of tracks, off-format ballads (scheduled once per hour), was defined by the programmer before the meter existed. The meter never received that grouping, yet it places the group visibly lower.

Production score per track, by pre-existing programming label

803 tracks · in-format n = 721, mean 49.0 · off-format ballads n = 82, mean 40.9 · gap +8.2 points

Off-format ballads in red, format-native tracks in gray; heavy ticks mark group means. The distributions overlap, as expected for a medium effect: the separation is in the means, not a hard cutoff. Source: legacy-station programming labels vs meter scores; retrospective analysis of archived data.