This week, Radiocentre Ireland, the industry body formed by RTÉ and Independent Broadcasters of Ireland, published its regular Irish Audio Report.
The report draws on the data compiled by Ipsos B&A for the most recent set of JNLRs (joint national listenership research), which were published last week and widely reported in the media.
On the surface, it all appears to be going swimmingly for Irish radio, even among young listeners. In fact, among people aged between 15-24, live radio has a whopping 67.3 per cent of the market for “commercial audio”, meaning audio content that is available for advertising. Although this is down 2.7 percentage points from last year, the figure is remarkably strong given that music streaming is a distant second with a 14.7 per cent share.
[ The JNLRs tell us young people love radio. Seriously?Opens in new window ]
Daily, the report concludes, live radio is the number one choice for 15- to 24-year-olds, listened to by 59 per cent of the cohort. That’s better than the 52 per cent who consume streamed music every day and the quarter who use YouTube Music.
The only trouble with these conclusions is that they don’t seem to chime with reality. Ask anyone in your life aged between 15 and 24 how much radio they listen to, and you’re more likely to receive a sarcastic laugh than a verbal answer.
Maybe young people are secretly tuning into Morning Ireland and the Hard Shoulder as an act of analogue rebellion in a digital world. Or maybe there’s something awry with the statistics.
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The almost 17,000-person national sample upon which Ipsos bases the JNLRs is “many multiples of the sample sizes used in the party political polls”, as The Irish Times’s Hugh Linehan highlighted in his column earlier this year.
Yet, for whatever reason, the figures don’t appear to chime with what most of us would believe to be the reality of listenership habits among young people – the digital age among younger listeners.
