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Throughout the history of Share of Ear®, we’ve tracked the total amount of audio listened to by Americans age 13+. While many aspects of listening have changed dramatically, from the platforms consumers are using to the content they listen to, it has consistently held true that the majority of listening takes place in the home. Historically, it was a small but fairly consistent majority. When the world changed in early 2020, so did audio listening. Suddenly, we were listening to far more audio at home than all other locations (50 minutes more per day, at the peak).
We covered this change in real-time, showing the dramatic shift toward at-home listening in the midst of the 2020 pandemic. What we couldn’t have predicted at the time is that this trend would continue long past the official lockdowns. In fact, at-home listening did not peak until Q4 2022, two and a half years later. During that year, even as listening in other locations began to slowly rise again, we still listened to over 2 ½ hours of audio at home every day.
Though it was perfectly reasonable to wonder whether the pandemic had permanently supercharged our audio habits, the location differential finally started to show signs of cracking throughout 2023. Now, as the dust settles on 2024, what we see in its wake is a return to normalcy in one way: audio consumption.
