It may be one of radio’s most deep-seated fears, but Country radio’s heaviest streamers aren’t abandoning AM/FM. In fact, it’s just the opposite, per new analysis from nuVoodoo presented in a new CRS360 webinar expanding on research presented at CRS 2026.
Country Radio Broadcasters released “The Music Test,” following its well-attended research session at CRS 2026. NuVoodoo President Leigh Jacobs presented the webinar alongside CRS Research Co-Chairs Clay Hunnicutt and Justin Chase, with CRS Executive Director RJ Curtis hosting.
The top-line finding: radio and streaming appear to reinforce each other with Country listeners rather than compete. 94% of surveyed country fans use streaming services, and 86% still tune to AM/FM. Among heavy Digital Service Provider users, three in five also qualified as heavy radio listeners. The two habits
Radio’s edge over streaming showed up most clearly around new music discovery. Overall, 58% of respondents said they were extremely interested in new country songs; a figure that climbed to 65% among Country radio P1s and fell below half among heavy streamers with light AM/FM habits.
The 427 songs tested spanned five decades and were scored using a weighted two-pop metric that doubled votes from listeners who called a song a favorite. Pre-2010 titles posted the strongest aggregate performance. Songs from 2015 to 2019 fared well as a group, while 2024 and 2025 titles showed more variance, in part because 14 streaming-dominant tracks with limited over-the-air exposure were included to test whether radio was leaving catalog on the table. Most landed in the lower half of the ranker.
Gender splits surfaced as a practical scheduling concern. Hunnicutt noted that country stations are increasingly delivering near-equal or male-skewing AQH; a shift from the format’s historically female-dominant audience. Women 25 to 49 showed the strongest preference for pre-2010 titles, while men 18 to 34 skewed newer. “Three in ten men 18 to 34 have been country fans for five years or less,” Jacobs noted. “They’re finding the format now.”
On gold versus currents, Jacobs was pointed: “The gold is here to fill in those moments when you don’t have anything that’s just oh making the ground shake that you’re playing as a current. It’s a current-driven format.”
NuVoodoo conducted the test on behalf of CRS, drawing on 600 country fans screened from more than 2,000 interviews, all of whom named Country as their favorite genre. The sample reflected US population benchmarks for gender, age, and region among adults 18 to 49.
Full tabulations broken out by gender, age demo, US region, and time as a Country fan are available on the CRS website. The companion strategic study will get the CRS360 treatment in May.
