Recently this newsletter spotlighted the steady growth of podcasts to being the most popular listening platform in terms of daily time spent listening to spoken-word audio, narrowly surpassing AM/FM radio.
Our past insight focused on 13+ Share of Ear® data from the past ten years. Given the popularity of that post, we decided to dig a bit deeper and look at how these figures differ among various age groups.
Among Americans 13+, 40% of time spent with spoken-word audio is spent listening to podcasts; 39% is spent listening to AM/FM radio (including AM/FM streams), the historic spoken-word listening leader.
Spoken-word listening time among Americans 13-34 is dominated by podcasts, with 53% of time being spent with that specific platform, versus 23% of time going to AM/FM radio. Radio does rebound among 35–54-year-olds but still falls short with 47% of their spoken-word listening time going to podcasts and 35% going to AM/FM radio. Our story completely changes among Americans ages 55+, who spend the majority of their spoken-word listening time with AM/FM radio, at 55%, and less than one-quarter of their time with podcasts at 22%.
The dominance of podcast listening among younger age cohorts can certainly be attributed to their preference for on-demand content that also includes visual elements, qualities specific to podcasts and not radio. AM/FM radio carries a wide variety of spoken-word offerings, ranging from sports play-by-play and sports talk, NPR programming, news and entertainment talk shows, to political talk.
Share of Ear® tracks other spoken-word audio sources including SiriusXM and audiobooks, but this particular analysis is just for AM/FM and podcasts. Products like Share of Ear® and Edison Podcast Metrics™ measure consumption of both video and audio-only podcasts.
