Radio 'most popular medium for discovering new music'

There’s a similar (if US-driven) piece of research from Targetspot which is quite a good read – AM/FM radio is the most popular way of discovering new music, still, even if – as this research did – you ask 1,000 people who listen to internet radio every day…

This isn’t overly surprising news. I would say that for a number of genres and audiences radio loses out to music news sites and blogs (e.g. Pitchfork and NME), but it’s natural that a service that inherently selects the music that you hear is a means by which you would hear something for the first time.

I’m curious how the 26% of individuals using YouTube would use it to ‘discover new music’. YouTube is a key source of music consumption now, especially for young people, but it’s not terribly intuitive for discovering new music that you’ve never heard before.

In terms of your question, I don’t think it matters a great deal. After all, most radio listeners are probably not listening, first and foremost, to discover new music. There’s exceptions, such as specialist music programming, but if you ask most listeners what they want to hear they will broadly state that they want to hear songs that they already know and love.

Also, this research presumably doesn’t cover where listeners go to hear songs after they’ve discovered them. Somebody may hear their new favourite song on BBC Radio 1 at lunchtime, for example, but to hear it again later that day I suspect that the average ‘music lover’ would look to listen on-demand rather than listen to Radio 1 more because the song they liked is on their playlist.