January 22nd, 2015
Most managers scratch their head over Streaming. They know they have to be there, however, the costs are high and the revenue is low. So, what’s really going on over there? According to a new report from Bridge Research, streaming and radio are maintaining a reciprocal relationship. The data compares radio station playlists to the number of songs that a station’s audience is actually consuming on-demand in a given week. The research indicates that although radio listeners may have specific tastes (CHR, Classic Rock, etc.), their streaming listening is broader.
Bridge Ratings President Dave Van Dyke says “Nowhere is this played out more graphically than when comparing a radio station’s typical weekly playlist with the list of songs streamed on-demand by their listeners over the course of the same week.”
CHR formats had the smallest percentage of all the songs streamed by their audience that week in the Top 10 markets, just 3.3 percent. On Classic Rock, out of 2114 streamed songs on-demand that week by that station’s listeners, the classic rocker played 790 or 37 percent of them. Classic Rock and library-based radio stations tend to repeat their songs less frequently because they have many more titles to choose from, playing by different rules than CHR and tighter-playlisted stations.
Van Dyke says, “This isn’t a referendum on radio formats, but rather a better understanding of the part that radio plays in the music consumption scheme of its listeners…We saw in our audio consumption study late last year that listeners use radio to help them choose music they want to stream”
According to Bridge on-demand streaming behavior continues to grow at a blistering pace; up 55% in 2014 over the previous year. “It is satisfying a variety of needs. In the case of radio listeners, streaming tends to be a complementary technology that is expanding music consumption and awareness while broadcast radio continues to serve its purpose as a curator of the most popular music as well as a source for music discovery.
Streaming is complementary to radio and that’s a good thing.”
RadioInk.com
