Pierre Bouvard, Chief Insights officer at Westwood One, is back at it in the company blog, divulging results of the subscription Share of Ear consumer survey conducted by Edison Research. Share of Ear is an ongoing project measuring time spent with all forms of audio among the U.S. population. Westwood One regularly shares results which illustrate the time-spent strength of podcasting and radio — the two key realms of Westwood One’s enterprise.
One of Bouvard’s key points in this latest blog post is the time-spent leadership of podcasting over ad-supported Spotify Free and Pandora. Important to remember this metrics doesn’t include listening to Spotify Premium (which serves over 100-million users who presumably listen pretty often), or Pandora’s subscription service. The point illuminates listening to audio with commercials. Here is the chart:
In other metrics, it’s no surprise that AM/FM radio culls enormous share of ear. That number changes across the many reports, but is always atop other listening sources — thanks to ubiquity, ease-of-use, and habit, we surmise. Westwood One doesn’t hesitate to show of that information image:
In-car listening to AM.FM enjoys an ever higher share of ear, at 88% for Q4 2020. (Down from 93% in Q4 2015, as the aged American car fleet slowly modernizes.)
There is much more Share of Ear knowledge to be scraped, including the extent to which podcast daily reach is growing among Millennials in one year; it’s a lot. Check out the blog.
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