Spotify held its slight lead over Pandora in March stream listening, an advantage established in January after three years of chasing. Aside from that metrics rivalry, the Top 20 group in Triton Digital’s Webcast Metrics report gained one percent in overall listening compared to February.
As always, RAIN uses Average Active Sessions (AAS) domestically (U.S. only), in the 6:00am to midnight — a lens we have used to track this report since 2009.
Worth noting: In the Average Time Spent Listening column, Pandora holds a substantial lead over Spotify users — and both giants sit at the feet of AccuRadio in this department:
- AccuRadio: 2.36 hours
- Pandora: 0.55 hours
- Spotify: 0.40 hours
Only four pureplay streamers are in Triton’s Top 20, those three plus iHeartRadio (which furnishes online-only playlists, podcasts, and broadcast streams).
Following are the trendlines for March leaders:
Year-over-year, overall webcast listening gained 11%. Leaders in that department were Hubbard and NPR (excluding Beasley and Entercom, whose YoY gains were boosted by acquisitions).
Smart Speakers
What? Yes, Triton Digital has included a smart speaker graphic in the March Ranker report, for the first time. It identifies which radio formats were played through smart speakers, by percentage of total listening hours. (Broadcast streams only.) This from John Rosso, President, Market Development:
“As the market penetration of smart speakers continues to rise, we are seeing a steady increase in the consumption of broadcast radio content on smart speakers. It’ll be interesting to watch how the overall consumption of the different formats, especially News/Talk and Top 40 CHR, change month over month moving forward, as more and more broadcasters embrace podcasting and other on-demand programming that can be consumed via smart speakers during in-home activities such as cooking or cleaning.”
Here is the breakdown:
