WorldwideUKIrelandAustraliamore
media.info

Online audio increases again

By James Cridland for media.info
Posted 23 August 2016, 1.26am edt





Triton Digital's Webcast Metrics have just been released for June 2016. This monitors selected online radio listening, and is a useful bellweather for the industry as a whole. Here are some of the highlights:

Online audio is increasing - in terms of 'average active sessions', pureplays (like Pandora) are up by 10% year-on-year, while broadcast simulcasts are up by 19.5%.

Mobile is becoming more important - 77.6% of total listening is now done on a mobile device. That's increased from 74.4% in the last six months, and is showing slow increases month-by-month.

iOS leads the way - 40% of all mobile listening was delivered over iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad). Android was responsible for 31% of all listening.

As background, the US smartphone market is 52% Android, 43% iOS; however, iOS appears to have a more affluent user-base (and thus more likely to have access to wifi and decent data packages).

The top ten individual networks in the global Audio Ranker (0600-0000), sorted by total time-spent-listening, are:

  1. iHeartRadio: 169,573,607 hours streamed in June 2016
  2. Prisa Radio: 36,032,752
  3. NPR Member Stations: 22,995,581
  4. Cumulus: 20,792,857
  5. CBS Radio: 18,403,763
  6. ESPN Radio: 10,256,819
  7. AccuRadio: 9,627,758
  8. Univision: 8,883,160
  9. Entercom: 8,638,287
  10. EMF: 7,971,619

iHeartRadio's figures, above, aren't the figure for the iHeartRadio app: just the figures for iHeartRadio's own streams, which account for around half the audio consumed within the app.

How big is internet radio? - to put these figures into an international, multiplatform, context, the "NPR Member Stations" global online-only figure above is equivalent to 5,365,635 hours listened a week. In the UK across all platforms, BBC Radio 4 achieves 124,359,000 hours a week. The UK 15+ population is 54m.

NPR Member Stations have an 'average active sessions' online-only figure of 44,454. In Sydney across all platforms, local public radio station 702 ABC Sydney has an average of 55,000 listeners per session. The Sydney 10+ population is 4.2m.

James Cridland — James runs media.info, and is a radio futurologist: a consultant, writer and public speaker who concentrates on the effect that new platforms and technology are having on the radio business. He also publishes a free daily newsletter about podcasting, Podnews, and a weekly radio trends newsletter.