Company News · September 29, 2010

The American Youth Study 2010 – Part One: Radio’s Future

By Edison Research

The American Youth Study 2010 is a significant survey of the media and technology habits of America’s 12-24 year-olds, and represents a sequel to a study originally conducted by Edison in 2000. In addition to a sample of today’s 12-24 year-old Americans, this study also re-examines a cohort from the 2000 study – today’s 22-34 year olds – to analyze how their tastes and habits have changed over the past decade.
The first release from this dataset is subtitled “Radio’s Future,” and is focused on the music discovery and consumption habits of young Americans. The study was sponsored by Radio-Info.com.
Principal findings from this study include the following:

12-24 year-old Americans reported Internet usage of two hours and fifty-two minutes per day, roughly triple this age group’s reported usage from 2000 (59 minutes).

Radio continues to be the medium most often used for music discovery, with 51% of 12-24 year-olds reporting that they “frequently” find out about new music by listening to the radio. Other significant sources include friends (46%), YouTube (31%) and social networking sites (16%).
20% of 12-24s have listened to Pandora in the last month, with 13% indicating usage in the past week. By comparison, 6% of 12-24s indicated they have listened to online streams from terrestrial AM/FM stations in the past week.
More than four in five 12-24s own a mobile phone in 2010 (up from only 29% in 2000), and these young Americans are using these phones as media convergence devices. 50% of younger mobile phone users have played games on their phones, 45% have accessed social networking sites, and 40% have used their phones to listen to music stored on their phones.
Music tastes have shifted among 12-24s over the past decade: those radio listeners who indicated that Top 40/Pop stations were their favorite have more than doubled, while Alternative Rock stations were selected by half as many listeners in 2010 as in 2000.
Today’s 22-34s have significantly changed their media consumption habits since the first study in this series 10 years ago. In 2000, 44% of 12-24s most often began their day by listening to the radio. Today, radio continues to lead, with 29% of that same cohort (today’s 22-34 year-olds) reporting that radio is the medium they use most in the morning, while Television (25%) and the Internet (23%) have gained significantly.

Download the presentation slides from American Youth Study presentation here.
METHODOLOGY STATEMENT
A total of 1,533 respondents were interviewed to investigate interest in, and consumption of, traditional and new media among American youth. From September 8 to September 13, 2010, interviews were conducted online with respondents age 12 to 34 chosen at random from a national sample of Knowledge Networks’ “KnowledgePanel,” an online panel that is representative of the entire U.S. population through its use of dual-frame sample recruitment and a known published sampling frame. Data from this year’s study is tracked with the 2000 Edison Research study, “Radio’s Future: Today’s 12 to 24 Year-Olds,” which was conducted via telephone.

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