Radio
I don’t trust research, methodology is key, and is so often suspect, and even worse, research will tell you where you’ve been, not where you’re going, but I point you to this recent study by Edison Research to counteract all the B.S. spewed by traditionalists in this industry as well as the blowhards at terrestrial radio.
We keep hearing radio is king. That’s what major labels focus on, getting acts on the radio. But would you be surprised to find out radio listening is cratering amongst the youth?
Time spent listening to radio by 12-24 year olds has dropped from 2 hours and 43 minutes in 2000 to 1 hour and 24 minutes today.
Time spent surfing the Web has jumped from 59 minutes a day to 2 hours and 52 minutes.
Yes, the study still says the majority find out about new music via radio, not sure I believe this, but the point is the same people saying radio is king and is flourishing are the same people who just couldn’t understand ten years ago why anybody would want an MP3, never mind a broadband connection to download one and watch YouTube which didn’t yet exist.
What do we hear constantly? That you need the major label? The major label’s main relationship is with radio, majors have lost their distribution dominance, anybody can distribute via iTunes, the dominant retailer, if this continues to decline, then..?
We need filters. And historically, the majors have provided this. But recently they’ve been doing a shitty job of this. Focused on purveying that which can get on Top Forty radio, they’re abandoning all those who couldn’t care less about the format, which based on the statistics in this survey seems to be the growing number.
Someone e-mailed me this article about the survey with a public radio spin. It’s the easiest to read of the three links I’m forwarding, so I’d start here:
The article links to another site which condenses some of the salient points:
The study is here. Be sure to click through the presentation down the page, there you’ll find a plethora of statistics if you want to know where we’ve been, which is very different from where we were ten years ago…where will we be ten years from now?
