Last week, we shared a blog post from Integr8 Research showing that song sales are still a worthy metric for radio to track. Now, the company used data from MusicWatch’s Audiocensus study to further assess the potential impact of streaming as well as downloaders. Digital downloads represent the tastes of listeners aged 25 and older, although the 25-34 age group also has nearly equal use of downloads and streaming. For listeners age 24 and younger, streaming data is a better representation of their tastes.

The MusicWatch data indicates that radio channels should take their cues about programming from different sources depending on which age groups are most critical to their ratings.