More on Music Discovery and Radio

Terrestrial radio may still be #1 with listeners for music discovery, but much of that is due to its much larger reach. Compare traditional radio’s reach to that of some of the other, newer ways for people to experience music:

• Pandora - The service claims 36 million active users (monthly) out of 100 million registered users.
• Sirius XM Satellite Radio - Weekly reach of 7.8 million, based on an estimate from The Media Audit. A more optimistic number would be Sirius/XM’s figure of 21.3 million subscribers.
• Spotify - 4 million registered users in the U.S. This is the most pure music number of all platforms (the others include spoken word listeners), but the amount of music discovery is questionable given the fact that Spotify is an on demand service. However, there’s no question that the Facebook integration has helped Spotify add a discovery component.

Now, to turn those figures around, perhaps radio’s status as the #1 source for new music discovery is not quite so impressive, given its tremendous lead in overall reach. Sirius/XM, for trails FM/AM radio in reach 30:1, but in terms of music discovery, it’s much closer.