Slashdot Mirror
Radio, Not YouTube, Is Still King of Music Discovery
journovampire writes: We might live in an age of YouTube and Spotify being the go-to music players of teenagers, but radio was still the top method of music discovery in the U.S. last year. According to the research, "59% of music listeners use a combination of over-the-air AM/FM radio and online radio streams to hear music," and "243 million U.S. consumers (aged 12 and over) tune in each week to radio – 91.3% of the national population tuning in across more than 250 local markets."
Next thing you know, there will be a story about how a lot of people still buy books and go to libraries!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Sirius/XM? yes. Why anyone would tolerate 10 minutes of music 10 minutes of DJ chatter, and 40 minutes of commercials I will never understand.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I simply don't hear radio much anymore. My kids don't listen to it, I don't hear it in cars driving by, I don't hear it much in stores, and I certainly don't listen to it.
But the simple numbers that tell an absolute and unmanipulable truth is the advertising revenue. Every other statistic is a complete and total fabrication created in an effort to prevent the total freefall of existing sales and stock prices. A great example of these desperadoes is that they often show revenues from 2009 to the present. This makes it look like a growth industry but in reality it is a recovery from the disaster that was 2008.
Quite simply people don't want to be told by a bunch of baby boomers what music to listen to. They have a device in their pockets that gives them total control. Remember these are the same sort of people who loved putting one good song on each CD so that people were effectively paying $20 per song.
Yeah, I wanted to write some remark about me finding most of my new music and bands by going to concerts for other bands that I like and being unexpectedly impressed by the opening act, which is something that if a person does iteratively is a way to pretty much ensure they ends up a hipster who's crazy into bands that nobody else has ever heard of. ;) Then thought, well, what if "at concerts" is an actual category in the study? I didn't want to get a bunch of snide "RTFA" remarks, so I went to check out the article... and saw a nice demonstration of Slashdot's lack of proofreading, to the point of not even checking whether their URL is malformed.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Why anyone would pay for something they can get for free I will never understand.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower