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INTERNET RADIO SOCIAL BUZZ

Social Media is a key indicator of audience engagement and what is resonating in the social media ecosphere.  While there are a number of social media channels for purposes of this analysis I chose Twitter.  I utilized the services of Socialping, a company that specializes in Twitter audience metrics. Socialping provides twitter analysis including monitoring key words.  I decided that I would apply Socialping measurement to Internet Radio.   I created watch lists for key words for the following;, iHeartradio, Pandora, TuneIn, KROQ, Rdio, WBLS and Spotify.  The measurement period is for one week beginning 2/25 – 3/3.

         

Unique Reach

Service

Followers

Tweets

Retweets

ALL

Average

Iheart

154,957

9,993

6,553

16,546

2,909,856

KROQ

68,570

1,554

2,128

3,682

1,248,637

Pandora

148,716

521,263

118,693

639,956

35,760,075

Rdio

90,145

10,403

7,905

18,308

3,768,454

Slacker

41,270

20,952

481

21,433

1,430,976

Spotify

436,545

275,878

38,230

314,108

35,500,325

Tunein

42,649

68,691

18,147

86,838

7,000,918

WBLS

7,096

2,107

413

2,520

679,258

The above data reveals several key findings;

1) Spotify is the leader in followers with almost 3x that of Pandora.  This is probably due to its more international offerings.  However, Pandora and Spotify have approximately the same reach.

2) iHeart radio has more followers than Pandora.  However, the # of tweets is only 3% of that for Pandora (Note: iHeart’s radio audience as reported by Triton Digital is 15.9% of Pandora’s).  Has Clear Channel driven people to follow but they are not engaging with the service?

3) One of the top single stations in the country, KROQ has roughly half the followers of iHeart Radio.

4)  While Tunein has less than one third the number of followers as iHeart they have 3x the reach.

Registered Users ARE NOT Audience

Yesterday at the Radio Ink Convergence Conference in San Jose Slacker’s CEO stated they had 26 million listeners.  In their IPO filing Pandora stated they had over 80 million registered users. I’m sure what Slacker’s CEO meant to say is that they have 26 million registered users.  There is a big difference between registered users and audience.   A large number of people may register and never use the service.  Actual audience is measured by Ando Media (now Triton Digital).  For the most recent data released, March 2011, Slacker and Pandora had an AAS of 39,697 and 599,214, respectively for the time period Monday-Friday 6 AM – 8 PM.  AAS is defined at Total Listening Hours (TLH) divided by the number of hours in the reported time period.  TLH is defined as the total number of hours that the station has streamed during sessions with a duration of at least one minute in total within the reported time period.  AAS in general reflects the average number of people listening.  For Slacker and Pandora this represents .15% and .75% respectively of their registered users.  Both companies cannot monetize registered users, it’s the audience that actually use the service that matters.