A new study being released by the Country Music Association suggests that adults 18-plus are far more likely to buy music after being exposed to it on YouTube, Spotify and other streaming services than listeners who hear a song for the first time on AM/FM radio.
The study, according to
Billboard, focused on consumers who remembered hearing a new track in the previous seven days, asked where they heard the music, if it was by an artist they were already familiar with, and how they responded to the most recent new song they heard.
Some 69 percent took some action, whether that meant searching for further information, playing it for a friend or making a purchase. Invariably, users who discovered the song online were more likely to respond. Half who listened on a streaming app did further research -- such as hitting Shazam to identify the artist, or Googling the lyrics. That figure is triple the 17 percent of radio listeners who conducted follow-up research.
More importantly for labels and artists, fans who streamed a new song were three times as likely to buy it than listeners who were exposed to it on radio. Some 25 percent of respondents purchased a new piece of material after hearing it for the first time online, while only 8 percent of radio listeners bought it.
Consuming music through apps is, of course, easier – and safer – than buying music while listening to the radio in a car. But that's not the only thing driving the disparity.
"A lot of the streaming users are very heavy music enthusiasts, so they do want to have a colleciton of music and they are buying the music," says CMA senior director market research Karen Stump. "Obviously it's not 50 percent, like we'd all like it to be, but compared to other discovery platforms, it is definitely a signfiicant player to driving purchase conversion."
"So what you're seeing in this report isn't just country music fans," Stump says. "It's all genres."
While radio listeners might be less liable to respond to new music, terrestrial broadcast is still the media where most people find new songs for the first time.
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