The study is based on thousands of online surveys filled in by public radio listeners who volunteered (generally, recruited from station e-mail lists) to take the survey, so it is not necessarily a representative sample of the universe of U.S. public radio listeners.
One consistent finding over recent years is that the audience for public radio in the U.S. is apparently surprisingly old: The average age of survey participants was 61.8 years old in 2019, 63.3 in 2021, and 64.3 in 2022. This year, of the survey participants, 59% were Baby Boomers, with 17% older, only 6% Millennials, and none in Gen-Z.
While the study still showed a strong interest in podcasting among public radio listeners — although more so when the station’s format is news/talk or AAA, less so when classical — it showed what Jacobs Media President Fred Jacobs called momentum that has “cooled considerably.”
He noted data shown in the chart below, with the percentage of last-week podcast listeners that said they have been listening to more podcasts in the past year declining from 44% in 2018-19, 39% in 2020, and 38% in 2021 to only 32% this year.
“The momentum slowdown is a bit more troubling, and might speak to snags in the user experience, including a lack of curation. Users may be generally locked into their favorites and may not be free-sampling lots of new shows,” Jacobs said.