A Dramatic Rise in Internet Radio Usage All Because of the Smartphone

More People Are Doing What You Already Knew, but now here are some numbers...

Tom Webster Vice President of Strategy and Marketing at Edison Research writes in his blog:


-This year, we are reporting that the weekly usage of Internet radio (which includes both the online streams of terrestrial broadcasters and streams from pure-play streamers such as Pandora) has increased from 22% of Americans 12+ in 2011 to 29% in 2012 – a jump of over 30%. This is a number that we are accustomed to seeing grow bit by bit each year, but this is the largest year-over-year increase we’ve seen since we began tracking this stat in 1998.

It’s easy to say that this kind of discontinuous jump is due to the increased usage of Pandora or Slacker or iHeartRadio or other individual brands, but I think there is a different dynamic at play here, driven by another discontinuous jump.


We’ll reveal our number on April 10th, but let’s just say that the percentage of Americans – mainstream Americans – who now own smartphones is going to show some growth, to put it mildly. The success of some of today’s popular on-demand and streaming Internet audio services is partially of their own doing, but also partially a trailing variable of the rise in smartphones and mobile media consumption. Read more...

Listening to a radio station over a smartphone or any other type of mobile device actually sounds better in most cases than listening to it on a radio or a computer... Look for more terrestrial stations to promote and develop their apps for smartphone consumers not only to meet the demand but essentially for their own survival. Which means the playing field day by day for music and media consumption is becoming a leveled one for sure.