Photo Credit: Edison Research
Listeners in the US spend 74% of their average daily audio time listening to music as opposed to podcasts and other spoken-word audio.
A new report from Edison Research reveals just how much Americans listen to music, and it’s more often than you might think. Despite the attention given to the prevalence of audiobooks and podcasts in the press, listeners in the United States spend 74% of their average daily audio time listening to music.
In a way, this might sound obvious — there’s a lot more music out there than podcasts and audiobooks. As Edison Research puts it, “If podcasts go back decades, music libraries go back hundreds of years (we’re looking at you, Bach, Gershwin, and more), and those substantive libraries are available on a variety of audio platforms.”
Interestingly, for listeners aged 13-plus in the US, 32% of their music-listening time is spent with AM/FM radio and radio streams, which makes radio the most-used source to deliver music content.
Streaming services like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Pandora, and YouTube trail closely behind at 28%, and YouTube for music and music videos accounts for 18% of daily music listening. Another 9% is spent with SiriusXM, 9% with “owned music” such as vinyl, CD, or downloaded digital files, and 3% is spent with music channels on TV.
Notably, this data pertains to listeners aged 13 and older. Looking at listeners aged 13-64 specifically, streaming surpasses AM/FM radio by one percentage point, with streaming accounting for 31% of music listening by this demographic.
Edison Research will unveil its Top 10 Findings of 2024 in a webinar on December 10 hosted by Edison Research Vice President Megan Lazovick and Director of Research Laura Ivey. The group’s findings on audio, podcasts, radio, exit polls, and more across Edison’s custom research and syndicated datasets will be presented by many of the researchers who worked on the studies.
Meanwhile, the fifth anniversary of the Latino Podcast Listener Report will be unveiled at a webinar on December 17, providing up to five years of trending data and other new findings about Latino podcast listeners. This report will highlight video interviews of podcast creators for the first time, discussing how they’ve utilized the studies throughout the years. The webinar will be presented by Gabriel Soto, Senior Director of Research at Edison Research, and Elsie Escobar, Director of Community and Content at Libsyn.
