Younger Australians are driving the growth of online radio listenership across the country, according to a new study.

The number of weekly radio online listeners among Australians in the 25–54-year-old age bracket has more than doubled climbing from 15 per cent to 31 per cent over the past three years.

The findings are noted in the annual Infinite Dial Australia report, conducted by Edison Research in conjunction with industry body Commercial Radio & Audio.

Radio reaches 81 per cent of the Australian population, which is 27 per cent higher than the US. Five times more Australians listen to radio than ad-supported Spotify.

Also, radio remains the top in-car content choice, with a 76 per cent higher listening rate than other sources. Streaming radio listening in cars rose by 75 per cent in two years, from 16 per cent of all respondents in 2022 to 28 per cent of those surveyed in 2024.

The national survey of 1,719 respondents showed Australians’ online radio listening habits were largely being changed due to the use of their smartphone to listen to radio content that can be easily accessed via apps.

Radio Audio podcast (Image: Sourced from Unsplash)

Edison Research president Larry Rosin said, “For younger people, really everything is to do with the phone…they’re very ¬attached to it and they are typically phone-first in everything they do. Any future-looking strategy that is targeting young people…has to keep that in mind.”

Rosin said listening to audio via smartphones was the “biggest changemaker of the last 20 years”. “As an example in the US, (for) a lot of the radio stations podcasting has come along and they aren’t creating…in some cases any content that you could podcast. Whereas your stations (in Australia) have so much going on that they are just creating (content) every day – all kinds of content that people might care about enough that they might listen to it on a time-shifted basis. You see all the investment that Australian radio has made, it’s really paying off.”

Alongside radio, podcast listenership is booming in Australia too. Australia has experienced a 20 per cent increase in podcast listenership over two years.

Forty-eight per cent of the Australian population aged 12 and over have listened to a podcast in the last month, which is more than the 47 per cent recorded in the US.

In Australia, 65 per cent of all those polled within the age bracket of 18-39 had listened to a podcast in the last month.

As for podcast content, 48 per cent heard podcasts with original content, while 32 per cent heard catch-up radio podcasts.

The report also found that smart speaker ownership in Australia has doubled to 34 per cent in four years, with 65 per cent of smart speaker owners in Australia age 12 and over having listened to audio in the last month through the device.