What Do Millennials Think About Radio?

NuVoodoo will be showing off its latest study concerning the listening habits of Millennials this Thursday, April 14, at Worldwide Radio Summit 2016 in Hollywood. The oldest of the group are already impacting 25+ demos and the youngest will soon be hitting 18+. What attitudes are they bringing with them to the listening environment?

We’ll be exploring whether they settle in for long spans with a single station or switch around constantly, fiddling to find a song they like from among the choices on the dial – and how that behavior correlates with their time spent listening to Broadcast Radio. We’ll dive in to find out what they like about Broadcast Radio – and where radio can do a better job relating to these young consumers.

To satisfy our own curiosity we asked about which sources they trust for news – and we admit the answers surprised us. Given radio’s reliance on mornings, we also looked into how radio works in the lives of these young people – while at home in the morning and once they’ve launched into the world for the day. We looked at whether radio is used in cars because it’s the only thing available or because they genuinely like the programming.

The authors credited with first using the term Millennials defined the generation as those born between 1982 and 2004 – though many other definitions have since been published. For this study we narrowed the range to 1986 to 2002. On the younger end we wanted to avoid the hurdles of interviewing children under age 14. We also ignored the oldest possible Millennials in order to focus primarily on those aging into adult demos.

We asked respondents what percentage of their overall time spent listening to anything was spent with a very wide variety of sources. There are some sharp differences even within the 15-year age span in our data. Here’s the result among one of the demo subsets within our study – we’ll reveal which demo at our session in Hollywood.

If you’re not attending Worldwide Radio Summit 2016, don’t worry. We’ll reveal which demo subgroup is shown in the chart in next week’s post – and how it contrasts with others in the sample. But, we’ll be showing that and a lot more at our session in Hollywood. Hope to see you there!