The Generation Gap in Music Streaming Adoption

Over the past few years, online radio services and other music streaming offerings have constantly risen in popularity. Aided by the rise of smartphones and the availability of fast and reliable wireless networks, streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify have been able to break through to the mainstream and build substantial user bases.

However, according to the latest edition of Edison's The Infinite Dial, an annual study on consumer adoption of digital media in the United States, there seems to be a big generation gap in the adoption of streaming services: while 77% of the respondents aged 12-24 and 61% of those aged 25-54 had streamed music within the month preceding the survey, only 26% of those aged 55 and above had done so.

The steep drop-off in usage from the age of 55 can be observed across all of the most popular music services, as our chart nicely illustrates.