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Thursday, December 1, 2022

Edison Research: Streaming Picking Up OTA Trending


Edison Research has revisited a data point they presented three years ago as part of their now-annual Top 10 Findings countdown. Finding #9 from their 2019 list was “AM/FM Listening is almost exclusively over-the-air...still.” At the end of 2019, 92% of AM/FM listening by those in the U.S. age 13+ was done over the air, versus eight percent to the AM/FM streams.

Edison's semi-impatient editorial comment “still” in the headline of they finding showed that with the available ways to hear AM/FM radio streams through mobile and smart speakers, they expected more of a shift to streams.

Three years later, is this still the case? Today Edison goes to their most recent Share of Ear® data to find out.

The graphic below shows annual data from the inception of Share of Ear in 2014. The comparison only is concerning listening to AM/FM radio content – comparing listening on a ‘radio set’ to that done on any streaming device – phone, smart speaker, etc. In 2014, five percent of the total AM/FM listening among those in the U.S. 13+ was to the station streams, with 95% being over the air.

There was almost no change in share of time with streaming compared with over-the-air listening from 2015 to 2019. In that four-year span, streaming increased by one percentage point. But in one year between 2019 and 2020, the percent of AM/FM listening time spent with station streams increased from 8% to 11%, and is now at 12%.





According to Edison,  it’s probable that time at home and away from our cars due to quarantine restrictions caused a bump in the percent of total AM/FM audio time spent with streams. It’s also worth noting that as overall time with over-the-air AM/FM decreases, the time with station streams makes up a bigger portion of the total.

Listeners age 25-54 are the most likely to consume AM/FM radio via a station stream. As shown in the graph, 12% of the AM/FM listening by those age 13+ is to the radio station streams. If you take a quick look at some age breaks: 13% of AM/FM listening by those age 13-24 is done to the streams, 17% of AM/FM listening by those age 25-54 is done to the streams, and of 7% of AM/FM listening by those age 55+ is done to the streams.

Edison states we are finally firmly in double digits with the percent of AM/FM consumption done to radio station streams on an overall basis, but probably still lower than one would expect given digital audio devices.

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