ARN has recorded its biggest ever month of digital listening with 8.2 million total listening hours in May.
Total listening hours were up 25% year-on-year in May with 1 million unique listeners. The digital platform also recorded 2.9 million smart speaker listening hours, up 64% year-on-year.
Total listening hours includes all live streaming stations managed by ARN.
Of the milestone, ARN’s head of digital audio, Corey Layton said, “Across live streaming stations ARN’s digital platforms continue to scale as we focus on greater personalisation for our audiences as part of our acquisition and retention strategy. With vast plans to build on this momentum underway, we’ll continue to give our audiences the very best audio content.”
ARN’s chief commercial officer Pete Whitehead said, “ARN has invested in our digital offering to ensure we provide the best integration and commercial opportunities for brands. We continue to focus on integrated cross promotional opportunities across our powerhouse radio brands and social footprint as well as expanding commercial partnerships – like TikTok Trending on iHeartRadio – that unlock new audiences. As a leader in digital audio, ARN is continuing to invest and innovate across our platforms to generate market-leading opportunities for our commercial partners.”
This follows data released earlier this year that showed ARN’s iHeartPodcast Network Australia had 91% growth in weekly downloads year-on-year across the platform.
The release of data comes as ARN’s iHeartPodcast Network Australia was named Australia’s #1 podcast publisher – holding the #1, #2, #4, and #5 most popular podcasts in the country – April data released from the Australian Podcast Ranker shows.
Total podcast downloads from Podcast Ranker participating publishers were 48.2m in April 2021. That is up significantly from 33.8m in April 2020. Month-on-month though the number is down slightly from 50m in March this year, the biggest month ever for downloads.
April was a record high month for average weekly downloads on the iHeartPodcast Network with record high downloads also seen in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia.