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Why do people listen to the radio?
Considers why people choose to listen to the radio, especially music radio, over their own CD collection.
One of the most crucial things about understanding and making radio is understanding what your customer wants. Your customer is the listener, except in commercial radio where it is the advertiser.
In commercial radio, therefore, you need to deliver to your customer (the advertisers) as many of the type of listener they want for as long as possible. So whilst a local commercial station classed as Chart-Hits will usually be aiming for non-professional 25-35 yr old predominately females, Classic FM will be aiming for a 30+ semi-professional male/female equal split. The reasoning is not that these different groups have different music tastes, but the advertising on the different station is either from different companies, or aimed differently.
This is similar to BBC radio; each station has a remit set by the BBC Governors who determine what category each station should aim for. So, the Radio 1 will be aiming for 16-25 yr old, equal male/female split. You can probably work out the other categories.
Again, if you work in student radio, your funding tends to come from the Student Union or University, which in turn is funded to benefit the students at the institution. Therefore, they will expect that your radio station aims specifically at the bulk of the audience - which is 18-23yr old, high earning-potential, intelligent, equal male/female split.
This is not to say that people outside these categories should not listen, indeed no-one is really going to mind if they do, but you shouldn't aim at those type of people. Indeed, the main reason they do listen is because they either aspire to be included in that category, or can't get what they want from the stations aimed at them. For example, Radio Five Live has a remit to aim at 25-44 yr olds but has a large teenage following because no other station offers them football coverage. It also has a large following from older listeners who want to still feel youthful.
There are also sub-categories that stations will also aim for, most notably local commercial stations that aim at 10-15yr olds. The reason is that in a family situation, most decisions about what to listen to are made by the children in that category. So, on the school run in the morning, the kids get into the car and put on Acme FM and hey presto mum gets to listen to all the adverts aimed at her.
Hospital radio is no different, except that its remit is to broadcast to as many people in the hospital as possible. The majority of patients in a general hospital will be 50+ equal male/female split and from a lower socio-economic grouping, but obviously this depends on where your hospital is. Therefore, playing banging house music for an hour is probably not going to deliver what your audience wants.
So we've determined who your listener is, now we need to work out why they listen. And the answer to that depends on the situation they listen to the radio. Most radio listening is done in the morning - and people tend to want information and entertainment in that order. They want, what's been called the "normality check" which is the news and sport - to check the world is still the same as when they went to bed. The want the "get to work check", which is the weather, travel and time information. And during this they want to be entertained. They also don't want to stop what they're doing to concentrate on the radio, so they want things in bite-size easy to digest lumps.
Once they've got to work, depending on where they're working, they'll tend to want the radio on to keep from being bored, whether it's working in a factory or warehouse, office or driving around. So they don't need so much information, more entertainment, but nothing that is going to require concentration.
So when they leave work, they'll require homebound traffic reports, extra news to tell them what's happened during the day whilst they've been away, perhaps some entertainment news such as tv or cinema guides to tell them what they could do or see tonight. And then into the evening and night-time, they require less information, and have more opportunity to concentrate on the radio so specialist shows and shows that require lots of user inter-activity can take place. If you can get people to listen to the radio as they go to bed that's the station that is on the dial when they wake up the next morning.
Look at an average station that is what happens. Obviously different stations that are targeting different groups will do things differently - BBC local radio stations tend to aim at older people who may well be at home during the day, so therefore have more time to interact and therefore they may well have phone-ins during the day. They also tend to carry more travel news than other stations, because of the RDS system that can, at the listeners discretion, cut across other stations when a traffic bulletin is broadcast.
So we can understand the bit about information giving, but why do listeners choose music-radio to be entertained? Just imagine for a moment that music-radio was only just invented, and the concept needed to be sold to the funders? Why would anyone listen to music radio over putting their own cd in the hi-fi, which gives them complete control over what they listen to and they don't have to put up with adverts?
The answer is in ease-of-use. The current buzzword is lean-back technology, which is what radio is. You press the on button, perhaps find the frequency, and then everything else is taken care of. You can listen to radio ad-infinitum and not have to do anything else. The RDS system even means that you can drive from one end of the country to the other and never have to re-tune your radio. There is no CD to change, no monthly charge to pay, and short of their being a power-cut you can listen to your radio forever more. Your one-button entertainment system.
Of course there are opportunities to participate and people do. But the first rule of radio is that just because no-one phones, it doesn't mean no-one's listening - it just means they are busy doing other things and have no incentive to call. Even the big cash give-aways will only attract an approximate 1 in 800 listeners to call in.
The other reason people listen for entertainment is the collective experience. This is, if everyone else in your peer group listens to a station you tend to, so you can discuss it in the classroom, pub or day-centre the next time you meet. "Did you hear that thing on Chris Moyles's show this morning?". Why do stations trail ahead when they are going to play a new record or interview a big star - not so you know, you're already listening, it's so that you can tell your friends about it.
The collective experience explains why people enjoy taking part in competitions, phone-ins and request shows; the knowledge that their voice is being heard across the stations broadcast area. Phone-ins, in particular, work because people want to express their opinion to the rest of the audience. Policy is never going to be changed as a result of a phone-in.
But perhaps the biggest reason that people listen to the radio, is because they always have. And the people around them always have. Radio is part and parcel of our life, and because of its ease-of-use, we switch the radio on as a matter of course when we need a quick-fix of entertainment or info. When you're washing the dishes, doing coursework, or driving to visit a relative, the radio goes on because you know it's there and you know it will provide music, talk or traffic information.