Arbitron and Edison Media Research did a study focusing on the effects of commercials against listenership on Terrestrial radio. None of this is really ground breaking stuff (spoiler: cheap people will sit through commercials for free radio), except for the difference in age groups.
First apparently 47 percent of consumers would listen to a radio station "a lot more" if the station had fewer commercial breaks, while 44 percent would listen "a lot more" if it had shorter commercial breaks.
Even more interesting, more than eight in 10 Americans consider listening to commercials a "fair price to pay" for free radio programming. (even if that programming sucks? I don't know if that was one of the questions...)
Now onto the good stuff.
According to the study, the 12 to 24 age group is bothered more by the quantity of commercials (58 percent) as opposed to how "annoying" they perceive those commercials to be (33 percent).
People in the 25 to 54 age group also are more bothered by the quantity (53 percent) than the quality of commercials (37 percent).
Listeners 55 and older are slightly more bothered by annoying commercials (44 percent) than they are by the number of commercials (35 percent).
So, the younger listeners are getting more and more accustomed to listening to commercial-free music (no doubt because of the terrabytes of mp3s sitting on their hard drives). As they get older, Terrestrial listenership will quickly dwindle unless Big Radio changes something - fast. Meanwhile, the old bags are willing to sit through Dial-A-Mattress and 1-800-EAST-WEST commercials as long as they don't have to hear that damn jingle anymore. What about the hours of incessant begging marathons on NPR? Is there a study on that?
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