Inside Radio reported new diary-based research indicating that AM/FM radio occupies at least two-thirds of audio minutes heard across generational divides. The study is branded by USA TouchPoints, a metered-behavior service launched in 2011 under the wing of the Media Behavior Institute (MBI).
The USA TouchPoints study could be framed as a counterpoint to the recently released Edison Research package, “The New MainStream.” The Edison survey focused on reach, revealing a data set in which 53 percent of online Americans listen to Internet radio to some extent. The USA TouchPoints focus is time spent, making two main assertions. First, that AM/FM represents about two-thirds of consumed audio minutes, while “Music Streaming Service” receives five to six percent of listening minutes. Second, that AM/FM occupies 23 percent of user engagement with all measured mediums. (The Internet as a whole got 18 percent, and television 57 percent.)
USA TouchPoints owns, or owned, mobile diary software derived in 2010 from the IPA TouchPoint study in the U.K. The measuring mandate extends beyond radio to the media landscape generally, intending to track consumer engagement with TV, radio, Internet, magazines and newspapers. USA TouchPoint’s original user panel was sized at 1,000 testers, each using an iPhone diary app. User effort was considerable, requiring each panelist to track location, social setting, and life activity along with specific media consumption, an average of 15 times a day for at least seven days, according to this documentation.
NOTE: According to the Media Behavior Institute’s website, the MBI discontinued operation in July of this year, with USA TouchPoints to follow. A brief notice states: “Unfortunately, the Media Behavior Institute will cease operations on July 31, 2013. Despite a growing client list, industry adoption of USA TouchPoints has not been sufficient and as a result, plans are underway to wind down the company.” Phone queries from RAIN have not been returned.
The key findings of this study comport pretty closely with what others have found — e.g., the split of consumers’ music/audio listening time is about 80% radio (all forms) and 20% personal music collections, TV gets about twice as much usage as radio, and so forth.
Internet radio’s share of total radio listening in this study seems to be 7.5% — i.e, 6% of radio’s 80% of audio usage. This seems a bit lower than other studies suggest — especially among younger demos — which could be for one of two reasons:
(1) The iPhone-based diary was apparently hierarchical: When reporting what one was doing at the moment, it seems that first one had to pick “Radio” or “Internet Entertainment,” then one picked either a radio format (e.g., country) or an streaming provider. It’s possible that young people who consider Pandora, for example, to be “radio” would have gone down the former path, and if so their listening could have been counted in the wrong bucket.
(2) In both today’s “Inside Radio” story and the firm’s 22-page PDF that describes its methodology, we couldn’t find the date the study was conducted. If the survey tracking was conducted more than a year ago, then the numbers would seem to be about right. –KH