When I was a kid everybody listened to baseball and rock and roll on portable radios. From the time I was 12 till I went away to college I fell every night asleep listening to the radio tucked under my pillow. I had favorite stations and personal relationships with disc jockeys.
Years later as a radio network and radio industry executive, I sold radio as a highly personal, targetable, mobile, local medium that was eclipsed but not killed by TV and cable. I argued that radio has a unique psychological connection with its listeners that other media can’t duplicate. Now in the digital age, radio’s exclusivity on mobility is gone and its place as the launching platform for bands and musical artists has been steadily diminishing, but radio continues to morph and survive.
And if you don’t believe me, take a look at recent national telephone survey of 1753 people (12+) conducted by Edison Research and Arbitron. Where 78% of respondents agreed that people will listen to as much AM/FM radio as they do now and where 27% or 70 million people admitted to listening to radio online in the last month.
Other salient and life-affirming (at least for radio) facts that emerged are …
40% of young people (12-24) would listen to more FM radio if their cell phones had an FM tuner. More than half said they’d be very disappointed if their favorite station went off the air.
Radio listening is done primarily over the air (74%) versus 23% online via computer audio streams. A third of respondents had heard of HD(high definition) radio and 3 out of 4 were familiar with SiriusXM satellite radio.
39% still expect radio to introduce them to new sounds, new artists and new musical genres, though the Internet with 31% is closing fast. Pandora is a big factor.
43 million people listened to online radio in the last week. Yours truly is one of them. Evidently listeners like me, who tune in on their computers at work, can cherry pick the best stations in their favorite format from across the dial and across the globe. It’s about control, variety and fewer commercials.
Online radio is attracting 15% more listeners than AM/FM listeners combined. Cars, MP3 players and cell or smartphones are the preferred reception devices. Not surprising, big radio listeners listen more over the air and online than the average listener. Yet only 1 in 3 have ever visited a radio station web site.
The online radio audience is worth selling to. More than half of online listeners (55%) are college-educated men and two-thirds are 25-54 and employed full-time with almost 1 in 5 earning $100K+ HH Incomes.
As a guy with a face made for radio, there’s goodness here. Nothing has ever killed off the radio star because the audio medium has a distinctive psychology which pushes buttons and provokes memories and stirs emotions in ways other media don’t. Radio has a unique and personal “method of action” which is its hedge against invention, fads and technology.
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Posted by: tony felt | April 27, 2010 at 12:05 PM