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Content is King

A three-part series on radio, fragmentation and the audio economy.

By Peter Don, BPR

Part 2:

Same Listeners, Different Routes

Radio’s listeners have not gone anywhere. The routes they take to audio have been rebuilt underneath them.

Part one made an unfashionable argument: radio’s audience has not deserted it, its reach across generations is still remarkable, and younger listeners value the medium for reasons the industry has barely started to appreciate.

None of which means the current position is fixed. Reach is holding, and the structure of listening is being rebuilt. The first gets reported quarterly. The second does not get reported at all.

Two questions worth asking

Is broadcast the same thing as podcasting? No, though the relationship matters far more than the distinction does.

Broadcast is scheduled and shared, and it runs on the economics of scale. Podcasting is chosen, portable, asynchronous, and it runs on the economics of the niche, which is a polite way of saying that the audiences are smaller but worth more per head. Different crafts, drawing on the same raw material: a voice, a concept, and a reason to keep listening. The industry has spent a decade treating them as rivals, when siblings raised in different houses would be nearer the mark.

Does radio compete with podcasts for discretionary listening time? Yes, every minute spent with a chosen show is a minute not spent with a scheduled one.

Six years, one mirror image

Edison Research’s Share of Ear now puts on-demand audio at 56% of all audio time in the United States, against 44% for linear formats. A twelve-point lead.

In 2020, linear held a twelve-point lead of its own.

That is a complete inversion of how audio time is structured, achieved inside six years. Whatever else gets argued about the sector, that reversal is the fact everything else has to be reconciled with, and most strategy decks are still written as though it were pending rather than done.

RAJAR carries a footnote alongside its reach figures. 27% of the UK population listens to podcasts weekly, and 11% of podcast listeners consume no radio at all.

That 11% looks small until you consider what it represents: a group that has looked at the medium and concluded it has nothing for them. They did not reach that conclusion in the abstract. They reached it on the evidence of what was available when they went looking.

What they find when they go looking

Podcast consumption is audio-first rather than video-first, by some margin. Roughly 53% consume audio only, 39% mostly listen with occasional video, and around 2% are primarily watchers. Those figures do not total 100, which tells you about these surveys, but the direction isn’t in doubt. Nobody is asking radio to become television. They want audio they can choose,  video is an add-on.

Content isn’t exotic. Comedy accounts for around 30% of global podcast listening hours, with Society & Culture near 18% and Lifestyle & Health around 15%. Personality, conversation, companionship. Exactly what radio has been making for a century, sold back to the same audience in a different container, one radio too often declines to use.

Listeners range across an average of 5.8 categories. Genre loyalty has more or less gone. Loyalty to a voice has not, and the expectation is that the voice will be found on the listener’s terms.

Distinction decides the strategy

Attention has moved to a different kind of access rather than to different content.

That distinction carries more weight than it sounds like it should, because the two diagnoses lead to entirely different strategies and entirely different budgets. If audiences wanted different content, radio would have to reinvent what it makes, at real cost, against competitors with deeper pockets and more patience. If audiences want different access to substantially the same content, then the problem is packaging, availability and rights. Those are unglamorous problems. They are also solvable, and solvable this financial year.

Part three turns to the question management actually asks. If the audience is there and the content is right, how does it become income?

Read Part 1 here

Sources. RAJAR quarterly listening figures, Q1 2026. Edison Research, Share of Ear (US), 2020 and 2026 waves. iHeartMedia research conducted by Critical Mass Media, June 2026 (n=1,090 US listeners aged 18 to 64), including Nielsen reach data cited within it. IAB US advertising revenue forecasts, 2026. Commercial Radio & Audio (Australia) quarterly revenue release, Q1 2026. Podcast category and consumption-mode figures are drawn from published industry aggregations and are indicative only.