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davidtanny's Blog
Topic: What Young People Want in Radio
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fiogf49gjkf0d What Young Radio Listeners Want (Aug 21, 2008)
The Nielsen Company has reported a survey on what tweens, teens, and young adults want out of radio today.
In a world full of streamable and portable digital music of all sorts, and they're so many of them that I don't need to name them anymore, it leads us to worry that terrestrial radio is doing what I thought it's been doing all along: not enough to lure in the younger listeners.
On June 26, the Conclave Learning Experience's "Reaching Younger Demos With Radio" session was presented by Anna D'Agrosa, editor of the Youth Market Hot Sheet and research director at Zandl Group, a New York-based company that follows trends, consumer insights and marketing.
Zandl took surveys and interviews over a one-year period. They surveyed over 3,500 people aged from 8 to 30 years of age. The topics ranged from entertainment, media, food and beverage, fashion, plus their aspirations and goals.
As for how that group listens to radio, 82% listen to terrestrial radio, 67% listened to Internet streams, 55% listened to satellite radio and 33% said they listened to podcasts.
Asked about what they liked about radio: 25% said they like learning about new music, 7% said they liked not knowing what the next song would be, 7% said they liked hearing old favorites, and only 1% said they liked hearing the top 10 songs.
What they thought was missing from radio programming? A whopping 52% said diversity in music, and 16% miss "funny and smart" personalities.
When you pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for a station, you lose all your room to take risks, nurture new talent, try new music or new artists. This is why you hear stale formats on most of the Clear Channel stations in town, formats like sports talk and chick country that people don't want (they want comedy talk and intelligent music). The HD2 channels are for the most part a waste of time. They have an opportunity to put on genres that have no representation here. Instead, we get new hard rock music, new country music, new top 40 music, reruns of morning shows, and a station that isn't PROUD enough to play more than just ten-year-old dance pop songs.
These are not the golden days for terrestrial radio. In the 60s when there was no competetion (no satellite, portable, Internet), AM radio ruled the airwaves with stations capable of getting 20 shares of the listening audience. At the time, music for all age groups coexisted without anyone in suits caring about getting the younger demographic numbers. Back then, nobody cared whether a 8 or an 80 year old listened to the station; they just cared if anybody listened. All of this fixation on the younger demos have ruined radio for everybody. The soft pop stations sound like the alternative rock stations. KYXY sounds like 91X, or is it the other way around? I liked it better when KYXY stuck with the dreaded Streisand and the soundalikes while the X didn't go softer than an Elvis Costello rock ballad, and no damn emo songs.
So what do the younger listeners do? Listen to their friends' new music reccomendations they found on the Net on their own portable MP3 players. They've been doing it for half a decade now. They want radio to take chances on new good music instead of playing suit-selected garbage that has no degree of originality.
I have several people that have been in radio and they have been telling me for some time now that I'm sitting on a gold mine with my radio station on the Internet. Time will tell.
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Member Comments:
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fiogf49gjkf0d Naturally commercial radio still dominates the morning and afternoon commute.... For the time it takes to get to and from work it's often pointless to take time to plug in the MP3 player. Of course, as more cars come equipped with MP3 capable CD players and portable player plug ins that will all change.
I totally agree that commercial radio sucks. But as long as the radio stations are run by tone deaf music industry execs with their neckties pulled on too tight, we can look forward to nothing in the area of meaningful change. Their livelihood depends upon the success of artists that are signed to their record labels. Indie artists send absolutely no money to the record companies.
If the current model is corporate run radio, perhaps somebody should start a radio network that is not owned/controlled by the RIAA and the record companies. I'm talking about indie radio being broadcast on AM and FM channels. Then really good music would once again be available and the indie artists would get well deserved airplay.
Of course, there is a danger here. The record industry would see the trend and buy up the indie labels and the radio stations.... and pervert them into their own diabolical design. If you don't believe that, take a look at the recent history in the Christian music market. The record companies started buying up Christian labels in the mid 80s and eventually watered them down so much that you can no longer tell if they are playing music or flushing the toilet. Some artists (like Amy Grant) went top 40, others (like Larry Norman) quit their contracts and went back into indie, while the rest just conformed into what the suits told them to play.
I sure wish it were possible to take these streaming shows with me away from the computer.
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fiogf49gjkf0d David, is this your words, or did you pick them up from somewhere else? Still something to ponder.
I agree, if radio stations want me to listen longer, give me more variety during that time. I will concede that the morning show or afternoon drive might have an average listen of about 20 minutes and the songs that most define the station need to be played. However when you get to other time-slots the station should try to encourage and reward longer listens.
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