During the The Jacobs Media Public Radio Techsurvey 2021 webinar Thursday afternoon, along with buckets of data about the public radio audience, there was a ton of data about radio in general, including how, despite sweeping technology advances in the automobile dashboard, radio is still the dominator.
Broadcast radio holds onto a 59% share of consumption in the car among public radio fans. SiriusXM was a distant second at 14%, followed by music collections at 9%.
It isn’t all great news though. Listening in the car is trending down. In 2019 the share was 62% and last year it was 61%. No doubt the industry must come up with more creative ways to move listeners back over to their stations to get those numbers rising again.
Your not wasting your money developing a stand-alone station app it appears. According to the new Jacobs media data, 36% surveyed have downloaded the app of their favorite radio station. Gen X leads the pack in this category, followed by Boomers. The top three formats are Triple A, Classical and News/Talk. And the stream is the most used feature followed by getting news, making a donation and listening to podcasts.
With smart speaker growth continuing, the Jacobs report says listening to AM/FM radio is the top use. Listening to a streaming service, setting a timer, weather reports and setting an alarm round out the top five. And, nearly one in every four smart speaker owner reports they spend more time with radio since purchasing their smart speaker device.
The Jacobs Media Public Radio Techsurvey 2021 data was accumulated from listeners of 56 U.S public radio stations from June 25th through July 25th. Most respondents are members of station databases. Some responses were from station websites or social media pages.
