Podcasting On The Rise
Podcasting has made its presence felt on the internet over the past year, with data from Bridge Ratings showing that around 5 million radio listeners downloaded at least one podcast in 2005, with the figure predicted to nearly double this year, and double again in 2007.
Turning to the demographic breakdown, 78% of those who had ever listened to a podcast were shown to be male, however, out of that group, women were found more likely than men to have listened in the past week.
Commenting on the findings, Mack McCrery, chief executive officer of Podtrac said: “With podcasting just over a year old, the current maleness of the podcast audience at the aggregate level is consistent with genre usage trends of the early web.”
He continued: “The fact that so many women who have listened to podcasts have done so recently signals the beginning of a trend toward a more balanced gender composition of the podcast audience.”
A similar study by research company, Diffusion Group, earlier this year, forecast the number of US podcast listeners to reach 4.5 million in 2005, growing to 56.8 million in 2010, while Forrester Research predict podcasting to reach 12.3 million US households by 2010.
Widespread broadband adoption, combined with the digitisation of music and the emergence of portable digital music players, is fundamentally changing the music sector, with industry experts projecting the industry to enjoy a period of strong growth over the coming years.
According to eMarketer’s Online Music: Downloads, Streaming, Radio, Mobile report, listeners are changing the way they buy, store, share and listen to music, with an increasing amount of music sales being conducted online.
Estimates of online digital music sales from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Jupiter Research both show impressive growth in the sector, with PWC forecasting a bullish annual growth of 89.1% between 2004 and 2008, compared to Jupiter’s less optimistic prediction of 52.2% (see Digital World Transforming Music Industry).
