Alexa Devices Dominate Smart Speaker Ownership

The Westwood One 2021 Audioscape covers two major innovations in the audio space: podcasts and smart speakers. The data is sourced from Edison Research’s “Share of Ear” study, CUMULUS MEDIA’s annual Podcast Download release, and Nielsen’s Scarborough USA+ studies.

Here is a closer look at the world of smart speakers, courtesy of this week's Westwood One's blog:

According to Edison Research’s “Share of Ear” study, smart speaker ownership has increased over five times since 2017 to 40%. If the pandemic slowed adoption during the first half of 2020, since then, smart speaker ownership growth has resumed.

Amazon Alexa devices dominate smart speaker ownership:

Among smart speaker owners, 80% have an Amazon Alexa device and 34% have a Google Home. Two-thirds of smart speaker owners only have an Alexa device, 20% only have a Google Home device, and 14% have both devices.

The vast majority of smart speaker listening occurs at home, even more so since the pandemic

AM/FM radio has the largest share of ad-supported audio on smart speakers

Nearly 40% of all ad-supported audio time spent on smart speakers goes to AM/FM radio. 18% of ad-supported time spent goes to podcasts.

TheKey takeaways:

• 40% of Americans own a smart speaker
• Amazon Alexa devices dominate smart speaker ownership
• Smart speaker ownership over-indexes in the top 50 markets
• Americans residing in tech hubs and a mix of major and medium markets are most likely to own smart speakers
• The vast majority of smart speaker listening occurs at home, even more so since the pandemic
• Middays are prime time for smart speaker time spent with the remaining time equally allocated to mornings, afternoons, and nights
• Given Amazon Alexa’s smart speaker device leadership, it is not surprising that Amazon Music leads all other audio platforms for total smart speaker time spent
• AM/FM radio has the largest share of ad-supported audio on smart speakers
• Smart speakers have brought radios back into the home and account for an increasing proportion of time spent with AM/FM radio streaming