Webcast listening up 12% year-over-year; November listening steady (Triton Digital)

triton digital canvas

Webcast listening in November gained one percent compared to the previous month, according to Triton Digital’s Webcast Metrics monthly Top 20 Ranker, released today.

Perennial leader Pandora was  flat compared to October’s report. Spotify gained 3%, and iHeartRadio saw a 6% lift in listening. As always in RAIN News tracking, we use Average Active Sessions (AAS) as the key metric, through the lens of 6:00am – 12:00am listening, Monday through Sunday.

The year-over-year performance of the three streaming leaders in Triton’s service show interesting and divergent courses. As illustrated in the chart below, Pandora is in a plateau phase while remaining the reach leader, Spotify has grown its listening the most during that period, and iHeartRadio experienced 8% growth. (NOTE: the red iHeartRadio line corresponds to the right-hand scale. iHeartRadio served 308,000 Average Active Sessions in November, compared to Spotify [1.4-million] and Pandora [2.0-million]. The lines are superimposed this way to better illustrate the shape of their trendlines.)


triton ranker nov2016 YoY 3 leaders b


Continuing a 2016 trend, the year-over-year comparison shows vigorous uplift — 12% more stream listening than October 2016 for the group as a whole. The individual leaders in year-over-year listening growth, measured as a percentage of Average Active Sessions, were Beasley (+159%, due to its acquisition of Greater Media, which disappears from the November report) and AccuRadio (+93%). (AccuRadio CEO Kurt Hanson is the Founder and Publisher of RAIN News.) New York Public Radio jumped 39% in stream listening year-over-year.

In the November report, Triton Digital noted that the most-listening time of day was 11:00am, reinforcing other research seeming to indicate that workplace streaming takes over after morning drive time on radio.

Below is the historical chart of the Ranker leaders dating back to September, 2009, showing the trajectory Pandora, Spotify, and iHeartRadio, with leaders of terrestrial webcast listening clustered underneath:


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Here is the graphic year-over-year comparison of the entire Top 20 group:


triton-ranker-nov2016-yoy


Brad Hill