Media Use Differences Between Generations

Here's Bridge Ratings' newest report which, as its focus is the differences media consumption differences between age groups and generations.

Certainly much has been written in the last few years about how the youth market consumes media differently than they ever have, but one of our clients wanted a more in-dept analysis of these differences.

The first area of interest is total media use. During the study, we asked a sample of 2922 persons 13+ "With all the media available to you, how many hours a day do you spend using it?" Media is defined as:

• Television
• Radio
• Internet Radio
• MP3 Players
• On-line video
• Internet browsing
• Movies
• Podcasting
• Cell phones (including IM and text messaging)
• Video gaming
• DVD viewing
• CD's
• Cassettes
• Email

The following chart compares total daily media consumption age group and the four year trend.

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Music Downloading

Which radio format primary listeners tend to download music off the Internet?

According to this study, fans of Country music are the least likely of all the radio formats listed to download music from the Internet. Youth-oriented formats have the highest with Urban and Rock falling in line next.

File Sharing

Demographically, how many consumers download and share their music files with other?

The number of teens downloading and sharing audio files has not been deterred by the actions of the RIAA, in fact two years ago the number of teens who downloaded and shared was 52%. Even the number of 25-34 year olds sharing audio files has increased over time from 19% in 2005 to 27% this year.

How many titles do you have on your MP3 player? Here by age group are the averages from this study:

Answers to this question included non-music entries on MP3 players such as audio books and podcasts.

Internet Radio

How do the generations differ when listening to Internet Radio?

We asked the sample to name as many Internet Radio services as they could as well as the one they spend the most time with. The average number of Internet radio stations listened to centers on about 3 per week, though as depicted in the following graph, a higher percentage of 13-34 year olds have 5 or more they listen to fairly regularly. And, the older the listener, the fewer stations listened to weekly.

Gen-Y's Media Use Comparisons