Most Country Music Listeners
Have Abandoned Radio...
    
courtesy MelPhillipsRadioViews.com
(Thursday, February 23, 2012)

There was some positive research presented on country music listening at the Country Radio Seminar yesterday but radio took a back seat as a vehicle delivering that music. One in five country music fans never tune in to country radio stations. Self-described country music listeners get their music from websites, their own collections stored on iPods or listening to other types of radio stations, the annual report on industry trends found. Larry Rosin, Edison Research president says "We run the risk that we just are more and more pleasing to fewer and fewer people until all we are is ecstatically pleasing a tiny, unsustainable number of people." Edison Research presented the study...  

The Tennessean lists some other data points presented by Edison. Sixty-five percent of country music fans don't pick a country radio station as their favorite for music or they don't listen to radio at all. Casual country fans are twice as likely to have begun listening to country music in the last few years. Many casual fans still like older country tunes. One in six say that country music from the 60s and 70s is their favorite. These are the songs that aren't typically played on country radio today. Many fans are getting their music from Classic Oldies or Classic Rock stations. Still, the same qualities found in country music continue to attract both hard-core and casual fans. Rosin sums up his findings: "I believe that we as an industry have really made a mistake in our conception of our own stations. While many people don't want to listen to classic country music, some still do, and we've let them float away." ...

Edison conducted a two-part study of Country music fans 18-54. The first part was a national online survey of 1,024 Country fans. The second part of their research was a series of one-on-one interviews with 32 people in 3 markets: Hartford, Wichita and Phoenix. All participants reported listening to Country music. All interviews were conducted in the 4th quarter of 2011.

Mel Phillips is a veteran radio programmer based in New York with these prominent stations included in his resume: WOR-FM, WXLO, WNBC, WRKO-AM/FM  & KQV.


http://melphillipsradioviews.com/2.html

Wow...an "online" survey concluded that people were getting their country music online. I wonder what the results would have been if the survey was conducted on air by a country radio station. Then they talked to a whole 32 people. Well I might as well burn my radio and find a real job. Radio MUST be dead.

Honestly...I am so sick of these B.S. stats.

I once went to a presentation that began with a graph that showed "Radio Advertising" rapidly declining over a five year period and "Internet Advertising." soaring upward. When I told the presenter that this simply wasn't true, he admitted that the graph represented how often the terms "radio advertising" and "internet advertising" were entered in a google search.

Well maybe that's because people don't use google to find out more about radio advertising. They call the local station.