Internet radio: 33M U.S. listeners each week

The number of Americans listening to a radio station online increased during the twelve months to January 2008, according to an annual report from Edison Media Research.

by Helen Leggatt

An estimated 33 million people age 12 or over listen to a radio station over the Internet during an average week, according to Edison’s report titled “Infinite Dial 2008: Radio’s Digital Platform”. That’s around 13% of the total American population aged over 12.

The data also appeared to show a correlation between social networkers and their online radio listening habits. Around a quarter (24%) of Americans age 12 or over have a social networking profile, this rises to 63% among radio listeners.

MySpace and LinkedIn were the most frequented social networking sites visited by radio listeners with 28% and 24% respectively.

"We found that online radio listeners are more than one and half times more likely to have a profile on a social networking site as compared to average Americans and that they tend to be power-users with one-third of online radio listeners logging on to their social networking site nearly every day or even multiple times per day,” said Diane Williams, senior analyst, custom research for Arbitron.

The complete study will be released in April, when it will be made available on Edison's website.