Music King: Listeners Prefer Radio To MP3s, CDs

Radio is still more popular than MP3 players and CDs among American consumers, according to a survey by Sonoro, a German audio electronics manufacturer. Sonoro's face-to-face survey of 560 respondents in January found that in total, they spent about 16,800 hours a week listening to some form of audio entertainment. Of those studied, 39% of the time was devoted to FM radio, 23% to MP3 players and iPods and 18% to CDs. When AM and Internet radio are included with FM, radio listening time increases to 57% of the total.

While Sonoro clearly has a stake in these findings as an audio electronics manufacturer, that doesn't necessarily mean it has a bias toward one kind of listening over another. Its new product--cubo, introduced at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show in 2008--is compatible with radio, Internet and personal MP3 players.

Although Sonoro did not release specific figures for Internet listening, in 2008 an annual study by Arbitron and Edison Media Research called the Infinite Dial found that about 54 million Americans, or 21% of the population, reported listening to Internet radio in the month preceding the survey.

That survey of 1,857 people also found that almost half (46%, or about 118 million people) had listened to radio at least once, and 13%, or about 33 million people had listened in the last week.

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