Last week, a joint venture from Eastlan Ratings and FMR Associates showed that AM/FM Radio listening dropped by exactly one percentage point in their 2025 study. Kent Phillips, a partner at FMR Associates, believes that story needs to be told more broadly.
In 2025, 85% of the more than 1,500 25-to-64-year-olds surveyed listen to radio weekly. That is in line with listening from 2023 and down one percent from 2024.
In the eyes of Phillips, it dispels the notion that radio is going belly up.
You get this feeling that radio’s dying and there’s something going on,” said Phillips. “In reality, we’ve been doing this study for several years now. In the last three or four years, it’s just been stable. 85-86% of people in our study, across the board, listen to radio. They tune in every week. Adults are still listening to radio. So any thoughts of ‘Eh, they’ve given up on the dial. They’re not there,’ is absolutely untrue. So that is a huge, huge win for radio … People are still, despite rumors to the contrary, are still checking out the radio.”
The data released by Eastlan and FMR Associates also details radio listening by market size, from 1-30 and markets 31+. And the data is largely the same. Now, there is some slightly more listening to AM stations in smaller markets. But even in the nation’s largest metros, AM/FM Radio still garners the lion’s share of listening.
Podcasting, however, is different from the stable numbers the study has shown for terrestrial radio in recent years. In 2025, the number of weekly podcast listeners surveyed jumped dramatically. According to Kent Phillips, in 2024, 24% of those surveyed were weekly podcast listeners. In 2024, that figure jumped to 39%.
Despite that huge jump, he noted the figure didn’t change much from AM/FM Radio, meaning podcast listeners added addition time spent listening to audio.
“The huge thing to me in that was weekly listening. It didn’t really come from radio. It’s just additional listening. Maybe it came from TV. It may have come from who knows, people listening longer, people adding more choices. It’s to hard to tell, but definitely podcasts took a big jump. The question is next year will it go back down in a non-election year? We’ll see.”
Potentially most important in the recent study was the perception of listeners among various formats and their feelings toward the length of commercial breaks. Some programmers have shared that potential changes to format clocks could be on the horizon due to the recent changes in the length of qualifying times for Nielsen, down from five minutes to three.
Programmers on the fence, though, about whether or not they should add additional, shorter stop sets or continue with longer commercial breaks aren’t going to get much help from the 1,500 surveyed by Eastlan Ratings and FMR Associates. No consensus was found by those surveyed. Kent Phillips couldn’t do much but chuckle at that revelation.
“Do what you think is best because — either way — you’re going to attract people and tick off people,” he said with a laugh. “We did the question this year, and we had never asked. People are wondering ‘Well, should we do fewer, shorter sets now that we’re doing this because the three-minute rule? Should we do a longer set?’ I thought we would ask because we were doing the survey anyway.
“The big takeaway is there’s no consensus,” Kent Phillips concluded. “So anybody saying that they know exactly what we should do — having a three-minute rule — is lying.”
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
