The RIAA released its 2019 year-end report, marking a fourth consecutive year of double-digit growth thanks to increases in subscription streaming. Streaming is now delivering nearly 80% of all recorded music revenue, holding steady at the share it delivered in the first half of the year. Continue Reading
Futuri Media collaborated with the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications for a survey into trends for country radio listening. The results were presented at CRS 2020. Continue Reading
The major tech companies making voice assistants all faced consumer backlash in the past several months over privacy issues. While many took steps to give users more control over participating in human review programs, the exposés also revealed that many smart speakers record their users at times when the individual hadn’t uttered a wake word. New research from a group of universities explored the extent to which popular TV shows can accidentally turn on a smart speaker’s microphone. Continue Reading
Edison Research has broken out a Top Ten Podcast ranker, which measures podcast popularity among weekly podcast listeners. The ranker will be released quarterly, and will represent a rolling four-quarter average. This method smooths out irregularities such as quick-rise, quick-fall podcast flashes in the pan. Continue Reading
Voicebot.ai and Cerence released a report about the use of voice assistants in cars. According to the survey of 1,090 U.S. adults, more people are using voice assistants in cars than on smart speakers. Just over half (50.9%) of U.S. adults, or about 129.7 million people, have used any kind of voice assistant in their vehicles. Continue Reading
Podtrac released its chart of the top 20 podcasts for January. The month displayed a shift toward news and politics programming. It also included shows that publish multiple times a day. Continue Reading
Nielsen released a special edition of its Total Audience Report focused on streaming media. From the overall survey audience, 38% of participants subscribed to one paid audio platform, compared with 37% not subscribing to any. The balance shifted across age brackets. Continue Reading
Deloitte released its annual report with predictions for the tech, media, and telecom sectors. The analysis included a section devoted to audiobooks and podcasts. Deloitte predicted that the global podcast market would be worth $1.1 billion in 2020, while it pegged the global audiobook market as hitting $3.5 billion. Continue Reading
RAIN has been tracking Triton Digital’s monthly Webcast Metrics Top 20 Ranker for more than 10 years, starting in September 2009. Looking back to that Ranker, we see a couple of interesting things — a trip down memory lane in the growth of streaming. Continue Reading
Strategy Analytics released its latest analysis on the global smart speaker market. Its Q4 results found that Amazon is still the top brand by market share, followed by Google, although both are being challenged by companies in China. Continue Reading
Podtrac released its list of the top 15 podcast publishers from January 2020. The month included a mixed set of results in terms of performance. Overall, Podtrac tracked 1.3 billion IAB-certified downloads across all its measured publishers. Continue Reading
MusicWatch reported that 10.7 million people in the U.S. accessed a major streaming service through illicit account sharing. Those people represent a potential $995 million in unpaid access. Continue Reading