Kiss Insight

YOUNG PEOPLE AND THE RADIO 03 October 2008

Why are younger audiences listening to the radio more? Kiss 100’s Joanna Knights investigates.

Radio has been progressively improved over the years through many phases of development. It seems that we have entered another phase. With the digital age in full throttle, radio is no longer simply a wireless communication, but a multitude of ever expanding brands, pioneering DJs and musical ideals. These factors combine to etch a distinct image in people’s minds of each station.                                                                        

In an iPhone-buying, 2.0 world, it may seem surprising that the humble radio, whose origins date back to 1893, should be in such rude health among younger audiences. And yet this is the key conclusion that we at Kiss drew from our last Rajar results. Indeed, this trend is apparent right across the UK. Why? Dig deeper, and a number of answers come to the surface…

The latest Rajar results from Kiss 100 surprised many people, us included, with just how well our 15-24 audience performed. Although 15-24s have always been a core part of our audience, such young and malleable listeners can be hard to gain loyalty from. Not only does radio have to compete against conventional media, but social media is now vying for their affection and time as well. In Qtr2 2008 Kiss 100 recorded its highest 15-24s market share since 1999 at 19.8%. But it wasn’t just a Kiss 100 success story. If you look at listening among 15-24s for all stations in London, in 2008 there are 4% more listeners than in 2004. When you compare all the way back to 1999 there are 7% more listeners.

This is part of a trend across the whole UK, as we witnessed through M-Lab’s research project into music. Kiss or indeed radio listeners weren’t specifically being targeted, this being a broader study of the nation’s tastes. A questions was asked: compared to five years ago, are you listening to music more, less or the same amount. Among the 30 to 39 age bracket, 31% said they were listening to music more; with 33% listening to radio more. Interestingly, the younger we went the bigger driver music and radio became. Among 19-29 year olds 53% said they were listening to music more and 43% were listening to radio more. The real shock was among16-18 year olds. 94% said that they were listening to music more with, significantly, 50% saying they were listening to radio more.

So what trends are enabling the radio to connect so well with a younger audience in this digital age? An increasing amount of time is being spent in the ‘third space’, that arena of time between home, work and play. Long commutes to work or school, as well as evening activities, provide time that begs to be filled. Radio is constantly available through DAB, FM, DTV and the internet. Couple this with research from Mintel that shows more than a quarter of 16-19s are listening to the radio via a mobile or other wireless platforms and you can see how the third space is an opportunity for radio to connect with young people (by comparison, once you get to 25-34s the amount that listen to wireless radio descends to 8% and continues downward with age thereafter).

Younger audiences are pioneering in their constant desire to incorporate the latest technology into everyday life, and with little responsibility they have the expendable cash that will feed these desires. New technology can feel like the key to staying on top of new music, providing people with the ability to have music at your fingertips.

Kiss strives to be at the forefront of musical development, changing to meet audience demands. We were the first radio broadcaster to offer advertisers the chance to appear on a five-second "audio bumper" that runs every time a listener tunes in via the total-kiss.com home page on their iPhone. Furthermore, we’ve added Kiss Kube to our website, which supports our ‘listen live’ and ‘listen again’ radio streams. The Kube allows the listener to explore the station with a search function that can find any text string that is used in the show description, aiding the listener in their 'musical journey' with recommended listening, as well as reliable, up-to-date 'who's on now, who's up next' information. Proof of the need for such advances was highlighted when the Kube’s doubled our amount of web traffic in its first week live. We’re now looking into developing the Kube to host Totalkiss TV and Kiss TV video in the near future.

Additionally, as a part of the Kiss The Planet promotion (featuring Sam Branson in the Arctic), we provided an opportunity for listeners to get involved and suggest how Kiss DJs and the totalkiss.com audience themselves could ‘Kiss The Planet’ and meet environmental challenges. Clearly, this goes beyond the traditional radio/listener relationship as it would have been known, say, five years ago.

But at the core of the station are still the pioneering, knowledgeable DJs who inform the audience on what’s new in numerous music genres. As Christian smith, group head of music at Kiss comments: “More forward thinking radio stations realise that young people want access to music instantly and they'll go and find it rather than wait for it to appear on iTunes or in store. Once they've heard it and like it, they want to hear it again. If they’ve heard it on Kiss, they're gonna return to hear it again. Even though there's so many more ways in which people can consume music, they know and trust Kiss to give them new music first.

“Radio is still people’s first introduction to most music and the lines between different musical genres are now so blurred. People have been introduced to a lot of different styles of music because their favourite artists have incorporated it into their music. Whether that's Usher & T.I. sampling 90's European dance singles, Kanye West sampling Daft Punk, Wiley sampling Daft Punk, Jazmine Sullivan sampling Daft Punk, EVERYONE sampling Daft Punk, or Timbaland producing the likes of The Hives! I think people like to hear more than one specific genre of music and Kiss gives you that, it’s trusted as a station with a bit of quality control. You could spend 24 hours of each day, seven days a week listening to music on the likes of MySpace, but when you listen to Kiss you know you're going to get the cream of it.”

Backing this up, research from the Radio Centre this year shows that 71% of respondents agree that radio introduced them to an artist they would not have heard elsewhere, while 68% of respondents said that hearing music on the radio influenced them to go out and purchase it; compared to 24% for the internet and 22% for TV. And radio continues to be the biggest driver for both discovering new music and stimulating music purchases in the digital age. 56% of their respondents said they discover new music mostly from the radio, three times as many as the 17% who cite the internet.

Extending popular brands into the digital radio arena is clearly a popular means to maintaining dominance. Creating new radio stations from brands that the listener will already know and trust, such as BBC’s 6 Music, Absolute Xtreme and Q radio, offers these brands the ability to branch out into the digital age with confidence of a ready-made audience, but with the aim to land in a new, younger audiences’ eyeline. Andy Roberts, head of music at Kiss, comments: “It's vital for Kiss to be available on every platform to create a closer relationship with our listeners. Our website in particular is crucial. Through it we can lead the listeners to other sites, videos and blogs and really help further their musical journey. Radio is still the core driver but the possibilities from that starting point are endless.”

The fact is people rarely have a quiet moment these days. Media researchers at M-Lab have found that the average Briton only enjoys 63 minutes of peace and quiet every day. And in lives that are increasingly saturated by television, radio, internet and telephone usage, 22% only have half an hour to themselves.  So in this society in which every minute is up for grabs, it’s imperative to be on every platform and grabbing people’s attention, making more than background noise and trying to connect emotionally with young audiences.

Radio’s role at the forefront of how a younger generation discovers new music reflects the larger cultural change in the use of time that mobile technology has created. With so much media vying for people’s attention, the manner in which radio wants to be part of the listeners’ life explains why young people feel connected to their stations.

For 15-24s the importance of image and status among peers means that they will listen to the station that best defines them. What Kiss is doing is connecting with the listener, offering depth and character that people feel they are a part of, or want to be a part of.