Streaming Is the New Normal

Viacom’s music group, comprised of MTV, VH1, and CMT, released summary results of survey exploring how teenagers and adults up to age 40 consume music. A survey population of 1,200 participants submitted to the quantitative study, which also includedqualititive secondary research and a mysterious “blography” component.Streaming was revealed as a mainstream behavior in the survey responses, with 78% of the group having streamed music in the past three months. The 22-30 cohort was more active than both older and younger respondents — 63% of them stream music every day. (That’s a much more active-use metric than normally found in consumer studies. Viacom calls its subjects “music fans,” and perhaps the selection process skewed to more persistent listening than average.)

Radio is important to this group, which credited both broadcast and the Internet as sources of music discovery. The process is described as “passive” — music is so prevalent and accessible that music fans don’t need to seek as much as merely listen.