2. The Crowded Ear
Our smartphones are packed with music and apps that provide us with access to streaming music services, such as Pandora, Spotify and iTunes Radio. In addition, all these choices are available in most new cars, including Sirius XM satellite radio.
Radio, like TV, is still a major source of news, entertainment, sports and other content and generates substantial network and local advertising revenue, but digital is quickly closing the gap.
For 2015, ad spending in digital media will increase 13.0%, but just 1.8% for radio and 1.7% for TV. By 2018, digital’s share will finally surpass TV’s and be more than 5 times the share of radio.

3. Radio Must Be on Your Radar
It’s absolutely critical that you, as a TV account executive, understand the current state of radio.
Not just because it is a competing medium, but maybe, more importantly, because you’ll have an advantage over your competition when you present yourself as a local media consultant and expert to your prospects and clients.
Being able to share insights and data about radio’s strengths and weaknesses will put you in a better position to influence how and where local businesses allocate their advertising budgets – and that will make you a winner in the long run.

4. The Radio Universe
Just as TV can show an almost ubiquitous penetration of American life, radio delivers similar numbers, with 243 million Americans, 12+, listening to radio each week, which calculates to more than a 91% weekly penetration rate.
The daily reach of radio for persons, 12+, was 66.2 percent and the total weekly time listening was 13 hours, 24 minutes, according to Nielsen’s June 2015 RADAR® report.
Teens have the lowest radio penetration rate, at 56%, and it’s even lower for male teens, at 53.1%, while the highest penetration rate is among adults, 35–64, at 71.3%, with a rate for males in this age group of 73%.

5. Can’t Work Without It
Radio continues to deliver peak audiences during the traditional dayparts: AM drive, 6am–10am; midday, 10am–3pm; and PM drive, 3pm–7pm, with 7am–8am, the highest-rated hour during the weekday and midday, 10am–3pm, the highest-rated daypart.
The total number of listeners, 12+, increased every weekday during spring 2014: Monday, million; Tuesday, million; Wednesday, million; Thursday, million; and Friday, million.
These demographic groups of full-time employed Americans are major weekly listeners of radio: Millennials, hours; Generation X, 13.7 hours; Baby Boomers, hours; Hispanics, 14.0 hours; and African Americans, hours.

6. Format Fundamentals
The Q (RTDNA)/Hofstra University Survey found local news lost another two minutes from the average weekday time stations scheduled news broadcasts, decreasing to 75.6 minutes.
The number of all-news stations has also declined from 37 during 2012 to 31 for 2014, and the all-news format is the lowest ranking format on Nielsen’s Top Formats of 2014.
Country is the clear #1 radio format with a total listening share of 15.2% during 2014, which was almost 50 percent more than the #2 format, news/talk/information, at 10.3%. Pop contemporary hit radio was third, at 8.0%.

7. Ad Dollars in Decline
By 2018, digital’s share of total US media ad spending will be 37.3%; TV, 35.7%; and radio, 7.1%, which will be no better than newspapers, at 7.1%.
For the period 2010–2014, total network radio advertising revenue decreased 2.7%, and spot ad revenue, 4.2%, while digital revenues increased 58.2%.
Of the 7,228 small, local businesses (SMBs) responding to a January–May 2015 survey from Borrell Associates, 37% said they wouldn’t be buying any radio advertising during 2015, compared to 23% for 2010.

8. Digital Delights
According to Pew Research Center, 27% of all Americans, age 12 and older, listened to online radio during the past month of a 2010 study. This percentage will essentially double and surpass 50% for the first time during 2015, or 53%.
Of even more importance for advertisers (and radio station executives) is that 73% of digital radio listening during the last week of the month measured during 2015 was via smartphones, a 22% increase from 2014.
Sirius XM satellite radio had 18.8 million subscribers during 2009, but its subscriber base increased 45 percent from that year to 2014’s 27.3 million.

9. Digital Tune-In
According to Triton Digital research, listening to online audio increased 38.6% from April 2014 to April 2015 for the Monday–Friday, 6am–8pm and 41.8% for Monday–Sunday, 6 am–midnight.
Edison Research’s Fall 2014 Share of Ear report revealed that 64% of teens, 13–17, listened to 64 minutes of streaming audio daily, compared to 53 minutes of traditional AM/FM stations and their online streams.
AM/FM radio was the top audio source for Americans, 13+, according to the Edison Research May 2014 Share of Ear report; however, the Fall 2014 report found that podcasts had become #1, at 30%, compared to 21% for AM/FM radio.

10. The App Gap
Prior to December 2009, radio stations that simulcast their programming on either a dedicated station app or an aggregation app (iHeartRadio, Radio.com, TuneIn, etc.) accounted for the majority of online radio usage.
By December 2014, however, stations’ simulcasts were still in the 250,000 to 300,000 range for average active sessions, compared to Pandora, which had increased from approximately 250,000 to two million during the same period.
This and additional research are revealing that Internet/pureplay services are driving essentially all of the increase in the online audio space via mobile, and especially smartphones.

11. The Unthinkable: Cars Without Radios
What may be radio station owners’ worst nightmare is that some analysts in both the automobile and audio-listening industries are predicting that a day will come (and maybe sooner than later) when cars are not manufactured with a radio.
BMW manufactured its new i3 electric car without the AM radio band; and General Motors no longer includes a CD player in its Sonic and Spark models and Kia has done the same in the Soul.
It’s difficult to know the direction of this trend since car manufacturers typically design new vehicles 18 months or more in advance and they don’t tend to share design specifics until new models are ready to roll into dealerships.

12. People Still Want an AM/FM Radio in Their Cars
Edison Research found during its Q research that 35% of the cellphone owners it surveyed said they had listened to online radio via their phone in the car at least once; during 2010, it was just 6%.
Edison Research also discovered during a 2015 survey that 85% of adults, 18+, had used AM/FM radio in their cars whether their model years were 2009 and older or 2010 and newer. The use of a CD was approximately the same.
Those adults with vehicles 2010 and newer, however, used an iPod/smartphone at a much higher rate than those with older vehicles, 51% and 33%, respectively. For Internet radio, it was 28% and 18%, and Sirius XM radio, 32% and 9%, respectively.

13. Balanced on a Razor’s Edge
The underlying conclusion of this special report from THE MEDIACENTER is that radio is in a much more tenuous position than television, which is still the #1 activity in the home.
Radio must rely primarily on an audience that is willing to listen outside the home, but digital audio is quickly becoming more popular because it can be accessed in the car and anywhere with a mobile device.
More importantly, if auto manufacturers actually begin to design and build more new vehicles without traditional radio access, then radio is destined to become as minor of a medium as print, and even directories.