Almost every American still listens to radio. Here’s why.
It’s hard to imagine that 243 million Americans have anything in common when it comes to media consumption, but according to a recent Nielsen report they do — and it might surprise you.
Ninety-one percent of Americans share a weekly activity, according to Nielsen. They all are tuning into radio.
It sounds surprising that radio reigns number one in media consumption. Aren’t there savvier and quicker ways to consume information in 2015? Perhaps scanning a listicle or flipping through a slideshow? Radio, after all, is associated with the past. It’s a gadget that conjures black and white images of people, huddling around a receiver, listening to news from abroad.
The Nielsen report sums up the continual power of radio with a succinct explanation: “always on, always local…and always reaching valuable consumers.” The report shows that radio listening isn’t linked to a particular demographic, be it age or race. It’s consumed by Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers all at rates above 90 percent for weekly radio listening. The report also breaks out profiles of African American and Hispanic listeners, who also tune in at rates exceeding 90 percent.
In this age of social media sharing, people often assume the most valuable content is maximally democratic. Anyone can follow a Twitter account or go onto a news website. Radical accessibility seems to be what’s great about the internet. But a national obsession with radio tells a different story, despite the limited reach of local radio stations.
“Radio has traditionally been a local business — bound by the strength of a transmitter’s signal the same way a newspaper was defined by how far delivery trucks drive in the morning,” writes Joseph Lichterman in Nieman Lab. However, this statement about radio comes with some caveats. Local radio isn’t entirely unique, as there are also local channels on TV. And radio isn’t always local, with internet-accessible podcasts and national radio stations.
But local radio has some advantages over local TV and non-local radio. Radio is also most frequently consumed outside the home, an opportunity for advertisers to promote themselves when people are on-the-go. Radio may represent the difference between letting someone know about local vendor while already out of the home, as opposed to on television when that same person is comfortably nesting on their couch, not planning to move any time soon.
Nielsen’s radio statistics were released just a month before the grim study by NPR that their streaming hours have decreased by 6 percent. NPR holds music streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify accountable for their decreasing music audience, but that 6 percent drop in hours shows that news streaming rates are also on the decline. NPR isn’t tanking any time soon though: their downloaded hours for podcasts have almost doubled. Unique users who download NPR podcasts are up 29 percent in the past year. This doesn’t come as a surprise to those who were keyed into the “Serial” phenomenon, a podcast last year which averaged over 1.5 million listeners each week.
The numbers reported by NPR and Nielsen seem to be telling different stories. Is radio dramatically more successful than any other media format, or are streaming rates dropping? Do users want local radio or self-curated podcasts? And what does all of this mean for radio?
First, it’s worth noting that the Nielsen and NPR studies focus on very different demographics. The average NPR listener will likely look very different than the average radio listener generally.
Both studies share a fundamental conclusion that audio, as medium for sharing information, is far from dead. In our highly visual culture that allows BuzzFeed listicles to go viral, one might think pictures are a necessity for successful content. And while the most viral BuzzFeed articles are read and shared millions of times, they don’t capture the attention of 91 percent of Americans. Based on the Nielsen statistics, it seems there is something about listening to a voice while also driving in a car, taking a run, or sitting at work that has maintained a lasting appeal amongst Americans.
The studies also overlap in their focus on the personal curation of audio content. The Nielsen report notes the popularity of streaming radio, which by definition is locally broadcasted. People continue to enjoy consuming media that is directly impactful to their own lives. While news streaming may be dropping on NPR, the popularity of podcasts is on the rise. Podcasts, like local radio, shares the personalization effect: a person chooses what to download, curating their own listening experience.
The Nielsen report may seems surprising on its surface, but in a media world constantly being reshaped by technology, it’s nice to know that at least one thing hasn’t changed.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on the AMS website. If you’re looking for more on the latest trends in media and technology, sign up for AMS’s weekly newsletter, the Digital Trends Index.
