EDISON RESEARCH: NUMBER OF HOUSEHOLDS WITHOUT A RADIO RECEIVER JUMPS TO 32%

According to Edison Research [link], the number of U.S. households without a radio is now 32%. 

This number has increased each year since 2008 when only 4% of U.S. households did not have an AM/FM receiver.

The new information is from the upcoming The Infinite Dial 2020®, a semi-annual study conducted by Edison and Triton Digital.

The Infinite Dial 2020® will be released on Thursday, March 19, 2020. Edison is hosting a free webinar at 1:00pm ET that day to present the full report. You will find registration information here.

Edison is promising to provide answer these questions during the webinar:

• What devices and/or platforms have replaced radios in the home?

• Do those who have no radios have smart speakers they use to hear radio?

2008 is an important baseline year because that is when Apple began selling the iPhone. 

Since then, the Smartphone has redefined the way people consume audio and video. 

After 2008, the percentage of households without a radio receiver has increased each year.

The trend away from AM/FM radio receivers began long before 2008. In 2018 we published a personal story [link] about the difficultly of finding a radio receiver to purchase in the mid 2000s.

Marie Mills

The story concerns my mother, Marie Mills, who died at the age of 80 in 2007.

Radio was her companion for most of her life. 

When my mom entered  hospice care she asked me to buy her a “transistor radio” so she could listen to her favorite station, KRSD, a repeater station of Minnesota Public Radio that played Classical music 24/7.

I thought it would be easy to find her a small portable radio in the shopping hub of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where she lived. That was more difficult than I expected.

I went to Walmart and Target and they had no radio receivers on sale. A salesperson at Target told me: “We’ve sold a radio in years.”

Then I  tried several electronics specialty stores, and again, they did not have a radio receiver in stock.

I finally checked with Lewis, a regional chain sort of like Walgreens. They had one AM/FM receiver in stock.  It was a bargain brand I had never heard of. The cost was less than ten dollars and it worked fine.

My mom listened to that radio day and night for the next couple of months. 

When she took her last breath, Classical MPR music was playing.

Before she died, she asked me to make a gift to Classical MPR in her name. I did, just as she had asked.

I am telling this story because there once was a time when virtually every household in America had a working AM/FM receiver. 

I don’t know if streaming station audio, mobile devices or smart speakers will ever reach as many people as AM/FM did just two decades ago. Probably not.

This isn’t bad and isn’t good, it is just is.

A WORLD WITHOUT RADIO

While doing research for this story, we found a YouTube video on Edison’s blog [link] titled A World Without Radio. You can see it on YouTube here.

Edison added this note about the video:

“The purpose of this bad B-movie trailer is to get everyone thinking about a world without radio. As ridiculous as the premise seems, if some catastrophic event took out radio transmitters, what would people do? Well, they would use the digital options they already have. It turns out that no catastrophic event is even necessary to create a shift in listening behavior – because it is already happening. Broadcast radio has a big problem: A hardware problem.”