Audio: Fact Sheet

The American public’s consumption of audio content, which includes radio news and talk shows in addition to music, sports and other programming, continues to increase. Advances in consumer technologies allow increasing numbers of Americans to choose to listen to radio on a variety of newer platforms, while at the same time, terrestrial radio continues to reach the overwhelming majority of the public.

On the financial side, radio revenues continued to trend at cross currents in 2015, with traditional “spot” advertising (ads aired during radio broadcasts) in decline and digital revenue on the rise. But for all the gains in digital, spot advertising still accounts for three-quarters of all radio revenue. Digital (station website advertising) amounts to less than 10%.

Most audio data does not break out programming or news stations by category, but BIA Kelsey does track the total number of all-news radio stations in the U.S., which held steady in 2015, though many of these may soon change hands as CBS Corporation prepares to sell or spin off its entire radio division.

Data on podcasts – an increasingly popular form of audio listening – and public radio are analyzed in separate fact sheets.

Radio Listenership

[chart id=”55493″ title=”Monthly online radio listenership has more than doubled since 2010″]

Satellite and web-based listening in cars

Sirius XM – the only satellite radio platform in the U.S. – reported an uptick in subscribers in 2015 to 29.6 million, up from 27.3 million in 2014.

According to Edison Research, web-based radio listening in cars held about steady, revealing a slowdown from the growth of the past several years. As of January 2016, 37% of U.S. adult cellphone owners have listened to online radio in the car. That is just slightly more than the 35% who did so in January 2015, but about six times the share (6%) who had done so in 2010.

[chart id=”55494″ title=”Growth in online car listening through cellphones slows”]

Still, traditional AM/FM radio is – and by a large margin – the most common form of in-car listening. Just 8% of listeners in the car named online radio as the source they used most often and 12% named satellite radio, compared with 63% who named AM/FM radio as the audio source they turned to most often. That is up only slightly from 60% in 2015.

Terrestrial listening

Traditional AM/FM terrestrial radio still retains its undiminished appeal for listeners – 91% of Americans ages 12 and older had listened to this form of radio in the week before they were surveyed in 2015, according to Nielsen Media Research. This data is derived from diary-collected listening information from a sample of over 395,000 respondents over the period of one week, as a part of Nielsen’s RADAR study.

News format listening

While most radio listenership data is not specific to news, Nielsen does identify two distinct categories of news-related stations – all news and news/talk/information. The cohort of all-news stations is small and in 2015 garnered about 1% of overall audience share of Americans 12 years of age or older, according to Nielsen. That was identical to the 2014 all-news share. The much larger cohort of stations identified as news/talk/information, however, remains one of the most popular radio formats in the U.S. This format – which offers a more limited amount of news programming, in addition to syndicated talk and other information – held steady at the 2014 level of 11% among the ages 12 and older demographic. The only format to attract more audience share is country music (14%).

Pew Research Center’s own survey work adds insight here, finding radio to be a common source of news among adults in the U.S. In research asking about how people are learning about the U.S. presidential election, 44% of adults said they learned about it from radio in the past week. Radio outpaced both national (23%) and local (29%) print newspapers, although it trailed local TV news (57%) and cable TV news (54%).

News stations

According to data from BIA Kelsey, at the close of 2015, the number of all-news stations stood at 32, an increase of just one from the previous year. However, that growth already appeared to have vanished in early 2016 with the news in late March that Cumulus Media laid off most of its news staff at KGO in San Francisco in a shift in format away from local news programming in favor of syndicated talk.

Although ownership of the remaining 31 all-news stations is divided among 16 entities, one company – CBS Corporation – owns 10, or about one-third of all of these stations. But in mid-March of 2016 CBS Chairman and Chief Executive Leslie Moonves announced that the company was exploring a range of options to sell or spin off its entire radio division of 117 stations – including the 10 news stations – spanning 26 markets.

[chart id=”55517″ title=”Number of news/talk/information radio stations fluctuates only slightly in past six years”]