The New "Transistor Radio" Is Also The New "Alarm Clock"

While Arbitron and Edison Research's 21st "Infinite Dial" study proclaims that in 2013 AM/FM radio remains, for now at least, "king" in the vehicle, our early birds are migrating south.

It's imperative that your smart phone app have a "wake up to your station" stream function if you want to be in the at home early morning game

Especially if you target under 35's.

It goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway!) that your morning show needs to be as personal, fresh, fun, entertaining, interactive and as consistently-relevant as your real competition for listening time at home in the morning:  an alarm sound, email, social networks and a browser!

Triangulation

It will take many days to fully digest all of the findings released yesterday by Arbitron, Edison Research and NPD Group, but one thing is already obvious.

Thinking about many research reports one at a time won't give you the full picture of broadcast radio's place in media usage.

As yesterday's post proposed on an entirely different set of info, before you make use of any research findings you didn't pay for, it's important to understand who did pay for each study and what their motivations are.

For example, this chart from NPD's “Music Acquisition Monitor:"

As Tom Taylor notes in his report of the study: "That headline needs a bunch of qualifiers – like the age of those “younger Americans” (13 to 35) and the fact that the 23% figure relates to music listening, not total listening to radio and/or other audio sources." 

Arbitron's Bill Rose and Edison's Tom Webster were quick today with insightful recommendations in their recaps of Infinite Dial 2013, so I simply want to share the following chart from it through which I think we need to view the NPD data:

Certainly, not many people use their two ears to listen to two separate audio sources at the same time, but that's about the only form of media multitasking that isn't going on - and growing - now.

The strength of "radio" is that it's available to use while you're doing other things. 

Simultaneous media usage is our future.  It's no longer a zero-sum game.  You need to look at as many data points as possible to get the full story.

Heck, even the word triangulation has more than one meaning.