To the Infinite Dial… and beyond

Welcome to Unmade, written in the UK while you were sleeping. Unless you were staying up late for the Nick Kyrgios thriller, that is. What a game. Wimbledon is looking pretty good this year.

Happy National Almond Buttercrunch Day.

I’m back at the laptop after a musical road trip around the UK. I can report that The Waterboys have very much still got it; The Eagles have just about still got it; and I feel no need to see ABC again.

Before I get to today’s topic, a final reminder… we are now in the last 48 hours of EOFYS – the pre-June 30 festival of capitalism by which companies attempt both the yin of tax minimisation by finding some extra expenditure before the end of the financial year, and the yang of urging others to do the same by buying their products.

As a pragmatic, if not entirely enthusiastic, participant in such capitalistic endeavours, Unmade has its own EOFY sale yin, while I also treat myself to a new monitor yang.

If you sign up as one of our paying members before the financial year ends tomorrow, you’ll be able to get an annual subscription to Unmade for just $292.50. That’s a 55% saving on the normal $650 price.

That price gets you behind the paywall for our member-only posts, along with access to our weekly Tuesdata analytical deep dives into specific industry sectors. It also includes discounted or free access to all Unmade events. And our paying members get emails like this a couple of hours before everyone else.

Next week, we’ll be publishing our third, detailed quarterly update for Unmade’s paying members on how the business is progressing. There’ll be graphs.

And slightly subversively, it means you’re supporting independent journalism whilst participating in capitalism. Much like a seagull crapping on an economist’s head. (Which is admittedly a metaphor I’m only using so I can use this picture I took of a seagull crapping on a statue of Adam Smith in Edinburgh last week.

Anyway, feel free to crap on capitalism’s head by signing up while you can.

We prepared for our road trip by getting the car serviced. It was only when we hit the road that we discovered that the mechanic had unoplugged the battery at some point, and the entertainment system now wanted a security code we did not possess. With a new phone and no music library yet downloaded, streaming on 02’s shithouse 4G network became our only audio option for both music and podcasts.

Which brings me neatly on to yesterday’s release of the annual Infinite Dial report for Australia.

The Infinite Dial is an annual survey of listening habits. It’s been running for six years in Australia and 25 years in the US.

While many industry-funded reports deserve to be treated with caution (the numbers rarely make the commissioners of the data look bad), Infinite Dial is worth taking seriously not just for its longevity, but for the insights it offers into one of the fastest changing areas of the media.

Yes, there are a couple of caveats.

There’s a degree of conflict of interest, as there always is in the media. The survey, conducted by Edison Research, is sponsored by industry body Commercial Radio Australia, along with audio streaming company Triton Digital and Southern Cross Austereo’s streaming platform Listnr.

And there’s also the necessary imprecision of this type of phone survey of 1,001 Australians. They’re asked to estimate their weekly and monthly audio habits. Do you know without looking how many podcasts you subscribe to each week, or how many hours per month you spend listening? You’d only be guessing, and so are those surveyed.

But over the years, with the same methodology repeated, the trends are interesting, even if the specific numbers can’t be taken as gospel. It’s worth a read. Or, if you’ve time, it’s worth watching Edison’s Larry Rosin present some of the highlights in yesterday’s webinar.

For the industry, the most anticipated statistics will be around podcast listening habits. The country’s big audio players, including SCA and ARN, are relying on the story of their streaming growth as a major plank of their argument to the share market that they are a good investment.

Over the last year, both companies have invested heavily in streaming. For SCA, it’s been all about podcast content for its Listnr platform, which recently marked its first anniversary. And it’s been a similar story from ARN, along with its relaunch three months ago of The Edge to streaming-first music brand Cada.

They need investors’ confidence. SCA’s share price is down by 44.1% for the year to date, while ARN’s owner HT&E is down 44.9%. Analogue radio isn’t seen as a future-facing investment.

So the bad news is that, based on the limited numbers offered in The Infinite Dial, the growth of podcasting seems to be stalling.

A total of 26% of those surveyed said they had listened to a podcast within the last week.

Impressively, that’s more than double the 10% number of five years ago. However, it’s also exactly the same number as it was in 2021.

We probably need another year of data to base many conclusions on that number though. Is it possible that last year’s number – which was a big jump from 17% to 26% – was slightly too high? Or are we now seeing a return to old habits compared to the Covid-skewed 2021?

The survey also asks about monthly as well as weekly listening habits.

The number is a bit better. A total of 40% of those surveyed thought they’d listened to a podcast within the last month. But again, the number seems to be plateauing. From a jump of 12 percentage points from 2020 to 2021, this time the increase was only three more percentage points.

If the definition of a mass medium is one consumed by the majority of the population, then these numbers suggest podcasting may never quite become that.

Adding some credibility to the number, the US version of The Infinite Dial delivered very similar scores.

Worth noting is that the percentage of Australians who say they listen to podcasts each month is now bigger for the first time than in the US.

Another key number is how many podcasts these people listen to.

Of those 26% of Australians who said they listened in the last week, on average they guessed they had listened to seven episodes apiece.

Even allowing for people possibly recalling a number higher than the reality, that suggests that for the now hundreds of professionally produced podcasts in Australia, there just isn’t enough audience to go round when it comes to monetising them through ads. Only those at the top end of the Australian Podcast Ranker or serving a specific, advertiser-friendly niche can hope to cover their costs. Programatic is not the answer. The sales teams really matter.

No information this year was released about what percentage of people who say they listen to each podcast to completion. Back in 2017, only half of weekly listeners said they listened to completion on each one.

Away from podcasting, there was other interesting data.

Around 28% of people say they own at least one smart speaker.

Google Nest is, surprisingly, much bigger than Amazon’s Alexa, although the gap has narrowed slightly.

One of the drawbacks of a survey commissioned at least partly as a marketing tool, is that we can’t know which pieces of bad news do not make it into the publicly available summary.

For instance, it would be surprising if they did not still ask a question about DAB+ digital radio listening. My guess is that nearly 13 years since DAB+ launched in Australia, takeup is still quite low. The Infinite Survey summary for 2017 is worth a read, just to see what’s not been released this time round. Back then, only 10% of people said they had a DAB+ radio receiver in their car, and only 3% used it as their main means of in-car listening.

My hunch is that DAB+ launched too late in Australia to take over from AM and FM, and listening habits will shift straight to streaming. So the radio networks are stuck with DAB+ as an expensive white elephant.

Then there are the numbers for people still listening to radio, whether live, streamed or (and this seems a bit like cheating) as podcast highlights.

In this case, the presentation showed comparisons since 2019. An impressive 80% said they listened in the last week, down just three percentage points on 2019.

That’s still a mass medium. But it’s still down more when going back to the 88% of 2018, which they’ve chosen to leave off the graph. That drop in radio listening from 88% of the population to 80% in just four years is a concern.

Overall, the picture is one of digital growth, and a mass reach medium. But there’s also a sense, that somewhere just out of the picture, you might glimpse out of the corner of your eye a medium that has peaked.

The Unmade Index: A slight recovery

In Saturday’s Best of the Week, we’ll take a close look at the performance of the ASX-listed companies to mark the end of the financial year.

This week as seen a slight recovery, although we’re still well down on the 1000-point opening of the index.

Yesterday saw SCA’s shares recover by another 5.3%, while Seven West Media fell back by 1.2%.

Time to let you get on with your Wednesday.

And one final time, please do consider taking out a paid Unmade membership. The price will never be as good again.

Have a great day

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

letters@unmade.media