Reports: Radio

Browse all of our reports, featuring our analysts' expert insights and analysis of audience segmentation, emerging trends and technologies, value chains, market shares, predictions and more – backed by our proprietary survey data and bespoke models & forecasts. Become a subscriber to get new ones every month, or just pick one to get started.

Music discovery snapshot Q4 2024
Breaking through the noise

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Olivia Jones

March 2025

Streaming

Marketing

Artists

Breaking through the noise is more important than ever for artists. As passive listening grows, facilitating active discovery has become a challenge. On top of this, the way consumers discover music is changing (and fragmenting) as streaming plays a weaker role in music discovery, overshadowed by YouTube and social media for younger consumers.

Before and after podcasts
Mapping the podcast listener journey

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Rutger Rosenborg

January 2025

US

UK

France

The global importance of video for podcasting extends into the unique market dynamics of the US, UK, France, Mexico, and Japan. Not only does this justify Spotify’s strategic video push, but it also indicates a need for other platforms to follow suit.

Socioeconomics of podcast listening
Engaging a higher value audience

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Rutger Rosenborg

October 2024

Creators

Subscriptions

Radio

Podcasts alone will struggle to monetise via subscriptions, leaving advertising as podcasts’ key source of revenue for the foreseeable future. However, podcasts do attract high-earning, high-spending audiences, which are often hard to reach with conventional advertising.

Audio substitute threat
Measuring consumer time allocation

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Rutger Rosenborg

February 2024

Streaming

cannibalization

Radio

All forms of entertainment compete not only for the same time, but increasingly for the same digital real estate. As audio streaming platforms move towards all-in-one access to multiple formats, both platforms and content providers must understand the threats of substitution and cannibalisation from within.

Radio WAUs
Blurring broadcast lines

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Annie Langston

July 2023

Spotify

Radio

iHeart

The radio industry has traditionally thought in terms of monthly audiences and reach rather than engagement. It is time for the radio industry to start thinking in terms of weekly engagement so that it can better benchmark itself against the wider picture of digital entertainment It is time for radio to think in terms of weekly active users (WAUs) As radio consumption steadily declines over time, it is imperative to understand the current userbases Globally, radio WAUs skew older, making the transition into digital platforms such as podcasting more challenging.

Podcasts and radio
How radio can play by its own rules

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Annie Langston

March 2023

Spotify

live

Radio

Radio set the stage for music streaming and podcasts, only to watch them take portions of its audience. However, there is a clear opportunity for radio companies to assert themselves in the podcast market, drawing on decades of programming expertise to retain audiences and find new ones.

The global podcast opportunity
Unlocking format growth

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Annie Langston

November 2022

Sweden

Spotify

Spotify

While mainstream media tends to focus on podcast growth in Western territories, understanding digital-audio consumption on a global scale will be key to future growth. Each territory has unique listener demographics and genre preferences that present various opportunities for podcast platforms, illustrating that podcast habits vary globally.

Closing the background gap
Focused versus background audio listening

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Kriss Thakrar, Tatiana Cirisano and Annie Langston

November 2022

Spotify

Radio

YouTube

The rise of attention inflation means that consumers are maximising their limited time by multitasking between various formats, spurring a rise in background consumption. This creates a “new” space for platforms to compete for consumers’ time. Among entertainment formats, audio is best placed to conquer background listening, but music streaming is more easily relegated to the background than podcasts.

Podcast market value chain
The next investment is the listeners

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Annie Langston

October 2022

Creators

Apple

Spotify

Investments from major audience platforms in audio infrastructure, such as hosting platforms and advertising, kickstarted the growth of the podcast market. With the basic infrastructure now in place, it is time for the major platforms to focus on growing the format by expanding listenership and user experience.

Radio audiences
A window of opportunity

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Mark Mulligan, Keith Jopling, Tatiana Cirisano and Annie Langston

September 2022

Streaming Music

Spotify

Radio

Streaming claimed radio’s younger, music-focused audiences while podcasts are now beginning to do the same for older, spoken-word audiences. However, it is not yet determined that the impact needs to be as disruptive for radio companies. With radio audience declines slowing, and even experiencing a modest rebound, a window of opportunity exists for radio companies to become masters of their own destinies.

Music consumer survey, Q3 2021
A new generation leans forward

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Tatiana Cirisano

February 2022

Creators

Radio

radio audiences

As streaming subscriptions rise and music increasingly competes with other forms of media for consumers’ limited attention spans, lean-back listening activities are taking precedence over those which are lean-forward. But the full picture is far more varied.

Audio audiences
Steady change

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Mark Mulligan, Tatiana Cirisano and Annie Langston

February 2022

Radio

radio audiences

music radio

Podcasts reinvigorated the audio market, bringing with it the promise of a ‘Netflix moment’ for radio. Though podcast audience growth has not kept pace with industry interest and hype, podcasts have been at the centre of a boom in audio consumption that was accentuated by Covid lockdowns, and that is recalibrating post-pandemic.

Attention economy
After the lockdown boom

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Mark Mulligan

November 2021

Consumer behaviour

Streaming Music

Radio

The pandemic-triggered change in everyday life resulted in a boom in entertainment consumption, which, in turn, saw growth in emerging formats as well as a temporary rebound for traditional formats. As the world starts to ease back into pre-pandemic routines, much of this newly found entertainment time will go – but the declines will not be evenly felt, with the emergence of clear winners and losers in the post-boom attention economy.

Media consumption
Lockdown’s attention boom

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Mark Mulligan

February 2021

Consumer behaviour

Spotify

Spotify

2020 was a year like no other. With large swathes of the population confined to their homes for portions of the year, audiences had more time on their hands and more money in their pockets. These conditions created a boom in entertainment consumption, throwing up a mixture of intuitive trends and unexpected winners.

Attention Economy
Media Consumption Q2 2020

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Mark Mulligan

July 2020

Streaming

Music Subscriptions

US

This report presents MIDiA’s Q2 2020 media consumption data, exploring time and money spent by consumers during the quarter. As such, it presents a snapshot of consumer behaviour that reflects both the impact of longer-term shifts and the shorter-term COVID-19 effect for the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France and Germany.

Music Consumer Survey
Country Snapshots

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Mark Mulligan

March 2020

Consumer behaviour

Streaming

US

Music consumer survey country snapshots for US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, and Sweden.

State of the Podcast Nation

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Mark Mulligan

July 2019

Apple

Spotify

Radio

Podcasts are an overnight success many years in the making. Podcasts were first added to Apple’s iTunes ecosystem in 2005, only to then spend a long time in the shadows. Now, however, they occupy the centre stage with radio companies, podcast vendors, streaming services and traditional media companies alike all trying to carve out roles.

Digital Consumer Ad Profiles
Targeting Music and Video Streamers

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Georgia Meyer

January 2019

Spotify

Radio

YouTube

Digital music and video consumers navigate an increasingly nuanced landscape of content formats, from paywalled to ad-supported to social. Levels of engagement with new social formats vary considerably amongst weekly active users (WAUs) of three of the main music streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Prime Music) and video streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube).

Radio 2018
Streaming’s Continuing Impact

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Mark Mulligan

October 2018

Streaming

Streaming Music

Spotify

This is a 2018 update to MIDiA’s 2017 report exploring the impact of streaming on radio audiences. The underlying data comes from MIDiA’s quarterly consumer tracker which was first fielded in Q4 2016. Companies and brands mentioned in this report: 2GB, 702 ABC, AdsWizz, BBC, BOOM-FM, CBC Radio One, CBC Radio Two, CHFI-FM, CHUM-FM, Capital FM, Digital Audio Exchange, Global Radio, Heart, KIIS-FM, Kiis106.

MIDiA Data Spotlight: Video Piracy
P2P Holding on in Emerging Markets

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Tim Mulligan

October 2018

Radio

video piracy

video consumption

This is part of MIDiA’s data snapshot series in which we spotlight curated consumer datasets. Figure 1:P2P Video Piracy is Relegated to Niche Audiences in Developed Markets but Still Has Traction in Emerging Markets Percentage of Consumers that Use P2P Networks to Download Video, Q1 2018 In developed markets P2P piracy has been reduced to a dwindling group of digital migrant diehards.

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