Current Issues In Media Management

First, there are the brands: Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music, NPR, Amazon Music, Audible, Google Play, iHeartRadio, and other companies like Stitcher, TuneIn, RadioPublic, and Luminary, all wanting a piece of the audio (and growing video) audience and market.

Then there are the technologies and social media platforms: podcasts, streaming, smart speakers, in-car media, and others.

In trying to understand the media landscape, there are a few sources of information for digital media consumer behavior research.

Since 1998, Edison Research has been conducting an annual research study of digital media consumer behavior in American called The Infinite Dial. In the recent survey, Edison made the following observations based on their findings:

Online audio has reached a new high in weekly time spent listening, potentially driven by podcasting and smart speakers.

Podcasting has reached a milestone, with the majority of Americans now saying they have ever listened to one.

Along with the increases in podcast listening, audiobook consumption also surged, indicating a trend towards increased spoken word audio consumption.

Smart speaker ownership continues to grow, approaching one in four Americans age 12+. The average smart speaker user possesses two devices.

In addition to the Infinite Dial project, the Pew Research Center evaluates listening to content in the United States by terrestrial radio listening, online listening and other sources and devices. Pew makes available a broad range of topics, data and insight into media and news, internet and technology, social media, and other valuable information.

Along with the Edison Research data and Pew Research, another source is Nielsen, a global measurement and data analytics company.

Using these sources to help understand digital media consumer behavior will be able to help you evaluate the current media landscape and identify current trends and nascent/emerging platforms.

image via https://calfschronicles.wordpress.com/author/frazierdevaney/

When Henry Jenkins, the author of Covergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide talks about convergence, he means “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted.”

He continues:

Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes, depending on who’s speaking and what they think they are talking about. In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms. Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers’ bedrooms. It is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers to have the media they want where they want it, when they want it, and in the format they want….

In a 2010 Ted Talk, Jenkins talked about how media convergence is an ongoing process that occurs at various intersections of technology, industry, content, and audiences.

Watch the video below.