Comscore on October 20, 2026 emailed its 2026 State of Audio report to its marketing list, a 27-page deck produced with TuneIn that pairs a survey of 3,242 US audio listeners with Comscore's own behavioral data. The deck leads with a 13% rise in monthly audio minutes against July 2023. Its own chart shows something less comfortable: the top 20 US audio properties logged 274 billion minutes in July 2026, down from 310 billion in July 2025.

In Short

Comscore, a company that measures what people watch and listen to, and TuneIn, a radio and podcast app, published a study about how Americans listen to audio and how they feel about ads. Listening time fell compared with an unusually strong 2025, but most listeners still say they would rather hear ads than pay for content. For advertisers, the report suggests ads that match the show or the listener get a better reception, though many of its numbers are what people say about themselves rather than what they actually did.

What arrived, and when

The report reached PPC Land as an email from Comscore Marketing dated October 20, 2026, under the subject line "The State of Audio Report is Here." According to the email, the report "explores how people are listening today, how behaviors are shifting across audio formats, and what listeners expect from both content and advertising." The PDF itself carries no publication date on any of its pages. Its file metadata records creation on October 16, 2026, four days before the email went out, and its title field reads "State of Audio 2026 | Comscore and TuneIn."

The cover describes the work as "in partnership with" TuneIn, and slide 20 calls TuneIn "State of Audio's research partner." TuneIn is not a neutral sponsor. Three of the 27 slides are labeled "TuneIn Audience Spotlight" and compare TuneIn Free users with everyone else in the sample. The email also promotes a live webinar on October 22, hosted by the ANA, where Comscore and TuneIn will discuss the findings. The download link in the email routes through a Comscore tracking domain, app.go.comscore.com, so the location of the public report page could not be confirmed from the email alone.

The study rests on two kinds of data. The first is the State of Audio Survey 2026, which according to the report covered 3,242 US audio listeners aged 18 and over, fielded from July to August 2026. The closing slide describes it as a "weighted survey of more than 3,200 US audio listeners." The second is behavioral: Comscore Media Metrix Multi-Platform minute counts, Plan Metrix Multi-Platform audience profiles, and Comscore Social engagement tracking. The report does not publish the survey's weighting method, the panel provider or a margin of error for the full sample.

The minutes chart

Slide 11 is headed "Audio consumption remains strong following a standout 2025." It plots total minutes across the top 20 audio properties for each July since 2023, according to Comscore Media Metrix. The bars read 243 billion for July 2023, 261 billion for July 2024, 310 billion for July 2025 and 274 billion for July 2026. A callout marks July 2026 at "+13% vs. July 2023."

The comparison the slide does not print is the year-over-year one. By PPC Land's calculation, July 2026 sits 36 billion minutes, or about 11.6%, below July 2025. The 2026 figure is still above both 2023 and 2024, which is the basis for the report's "remains strong" framing. Whether 2025 was an outlier or the start of a lost trend is a question the deck leaves open.

Slide 12 adds monthly detail. A line chart of total minutes for the same top 20 properties, which Comscore says include music, radio, podcast and audiobook content, runs from January 2023 to July 2026. The 2026 line opens the year at or above the 2025 line, then falls below it from roughly March onward and stays there through July. The slide calls March "an inflection point."

The same slide places that turn alongside two music audiences drawn from Plan Metrix, a different Comscore product that profiles adults 18 and over:

  • Free music-service listeners rose 9.3% in March 2026 compared with March 2025, then fell 8.7% in July 2026 compared with July 2025.
  • Paid music-service subscribers rose 4.3% in the March comparison, then fell 10.0% in the July comparison.

Comscore defines the free group as users of services such as YouTube Music Free, Spotify Free, Pandora, iHeart, Amazon Music Free, TuneIn Free and Tidal Free, and the paid group as subscribers to services such as Spotify Premium, Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited and TuneIn Premium. The report does not give the absolute size of either audience, so the percentage changes cannot be converted into listener counts. Nor does it explain what happened in March.

Radio and podcasts barely moved

Slide 13 shows reach among US adults for three formats, July 2025 against July 2026, according to Plan Metrix:

  • Radio, listened to during a typical weekday or weekend day: 61.6% to 61.8%
  • Podcasts, listened to during a typical week: 33.7% to 33.2%
  • Sports radio, listened to in the last seven days: 16.4% to 16.5%

None of these shifts exceeds half a percentage point. Slide 9 repeats the same data in rounded form, with 33% weekly podcast listening and 62% radio, and adds two six-month measures: 13% for audiobooks and 65% for music streaming. Taken together, the drop in minutes appears to come from how long people listened, or from which properties they used, rather than from fewer people listening to radio or podcasts at all. The report does not break the minute total down by format, so that reading cannot be confirmed from the deck.

Where and how people listen

The survey half of the report opens with routines. Asked when they listen, 72% of respondents said in the car, 68% while relaxing at home, 60% doing chores, 56% exercising and 49% while working, according to slide 5. Comscore notes that these five were chosen "to illustrate every day routines, not response ranking," which means other answers may have scored higher.

On devices, the smartphone leads at 71%, followed by car radio (AM, FM or satellite) at 61%, laptop or desktop at 43%, smart TV and connected car systems such as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto at 39% each, and smart speakers at 37%. Those are the top six of eleven options shown on slide 6.

Listening is mostly solitary. Respondents reported spending 83% of podcast time, 74% of music time and 73% of radio time alone. Yet choices are shaped by others: 37% named friends as an influence on what they listen to, 35% family and 24% people they live with, while 29% picked "no one." The base sizes differ here: 2,486 respondents answered the music question, 1,402 the podcast question and 1,788 the radio question.

Social engagement

Slide 10 shifts to Comscore Social data for July 2026. Podcast properties generated 129 million social engagements across Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok, radio 85 million and music streaming 9 million. The category footprints are not comparable: the podcast count covers more than 1,100 podcasts and networks, radio more than 4,600 stations, networks, programs and digital services, and music streaming only 37 platforms and channels. Comscore's own footnote warns that "engagement is not unique reach." The gap between podcasts and music streaming therefore says as much about how many accounts were tracked as about listener behavior.

The value exchange

The commercial core of the deck is slides 15 to 19. According to the survey, 58% of listeners prefer free audio with ads to paying for content. Separately, Plan Metrix data shows that three in four music streamers used a free online music service in July 2026.

Recall of audio advertising is substantial but uneven by position. Asked where they remembered hearing ads, 49% said before content started, 47% during content and 27% at the end. A quarter of respondents, 25%, said they did not recall hearing any audio advertising. The report labels this "self-reported recall" and notes that respondents could pick several placements, so the figures do not sum. In industry terms, the before-content slot is the pre-roll position, and the 49% figure is the highest ad recall number the deck reports for the full sample.

Slide 17 is where the friction shows. Among the 1,520 respondents who recalled hearing ads during their content, 53% described those mid-content ads as disruptive. At the same time, 48% of the full sample said they want ads related to what they are listening to and 47% want ads relevant to their interests and hobbies. Listeners, in other words, tolerate ads as the price of free access, but more than half of those who notice mid-content breaks find them intrusive.

What happens after an ad? According to slide 16, 26% said they learn about a new product, 21% search online for information, 20% visit a brand website or social account, 17% discuss the ad with someone and 16% purchase something advertised. The footnote is unusually direct: "Self-reported frequency after audio ads generally, not observed conversions, attributed sales or a sequential funnel." These are survey answers, not tracked outcomes.

One app for everything

Slide 19 reports that 69% of respondents would prefer one service for their streaming audio content. Asked which features matter most in an audio provider, 79% named affordability, 76% ease of use and 68% cross-device listening. The very next slide is TuneIn's, which describes its app as bringing "live sports, music, news, audiobooks and podcasts together in one audio experience." The adjacency is deliberate. The 69% figure is the bridge into the sponsor's section, and it comes from a question the report does not reproduce in full, so the exact wording put to respondents is unknown.

The TuneIn spotlight

The three spotlight slides compare 365 TuneIn Free users with 2,877 non-TuneIn Free users from the same survey. Comscore states on each slide that the differences shown "are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level."

According to the report:

  • Pre-content ad recall was 58% among TuneIn Free users against 47% among everyone else, an 11-point gap.
  • 33% of TuneIn Free users said they learn about a new product after audio ads, against 25%.
  • 37% said they search online for information, against 18%.
  • 38% said they visit a brand website or social account, against 17%.
  • 39% said they discuss the ad with someone, against 14%.
  • 36% said they purchase something advertised, against 13%, which the report presents as "+23pts higher reported purchase response."

Slide 24 adds a detail missing from the general slide 16: these figures count respondents who say they "often" do each activity after hearing an advertisement across all audio properties. That matters. The question is not about ads heard on TuneIn. It asks about audio advertising in general, and then splits respondents by whether they use TuneIn Free. The deck does not show whether the two groups differ in age, income, total listening time or the number of services used, any of which could account for part of the gap. A group of 365 people is also small compared with the 2,877 it is set against.

The numbers are internally consistent. Weighting the two groups by their sample sizes, PPC Land's calculation returns roughly 16% for purchase, 20% for search and 17% for discussion, close to the full-sample figures on slide 16. That suggests the spotlight is cut from the same survey base rather than a separate study.

TuneIn has been in PPC Land's coverage for years, mostly as a distribution and monetization partner. In 2021 it moved its ad monetization to Triton Digital and added 850 iHeartMedia digital stations, and more recently it appeared as a reach extension for Bauer Media Audio's audioXi network in Poland, Slovakia and Portugal in November 2025.

Why it matters for advertisers

Audio has spent years arguing it is underbought. The figure PPC Land has cited most often comes from AdsWizz's 2025 report, which put audio at 31% of consumer media time against 9% of advertising budgets. Comscore has used the same gap to sell its own tools. When it added streaming audio and podcasts to its cross-platform measurement suite in December 2025, and when it brought content-level audio targeting to The Trade Desk in January 2026, the pitch was that measurement, not demand, held audio back. By July 2026, Comscore had pushed transcript-level Proximic classification into Spotify, SiriusXM, Triton Digital, Acast and Libsyn.

The State of Audio report fits that sequence. Its relevance findings, 48% wanting ads tied to the content and 47% wanting ads tied to their interests, are the consumer-side argument for contextual products Comscore already sells. That does not make the numbers wrong, but it explains which numbers made the deck.

Measurement remains the sore point. ExchangeWire's Rachel Smith and Lindsay Rowntree argued in June that audio's full-funnel problem is that it lacks reliable last-click attribution, with platforms reporting different metrics. Comscore's own footnotes concede the point: the action figures are self-reported, not attributed sales. A Bauer Media Audio study in May found that only 13% of European advertisers confidently use audio attribution tools, even as 96% planned to hold or raise audio spend.

Other surveys point the same direction on behavior. Edison Research found that Americans aged 13 to 34 spend 4 hours 30 minutes a day with audio, and its Infinite Dial study put weekly listening among monthly online audio users at 94%. In the UK, a Sounds Profitable study reported that 44% of podcast ad listeners recalled buying something after an ad, also self-reported. Comscore's 16% purchase figure sits well below that, though the questions and markets differ.

The free-tier preference has commercial weight too. Spotify reported 483 million ad-supported monthly users in the first quarter of 2026, up 14%, against 293 million premium subscribers, with the freemium tier growing faster than the paid one. Comscore's 58% preference for ad-supported audio is consistent with that split. Yet the July Plan Metrix figures show the free music audience shrinking 8.7% year over year, which complicates any simple story about ad-supported growth.

Money is moving towards podcasts in particular. A VAB report in September cited eMarketer forecasts that podcasts will take 48% of US digital audio ad spending by 2030, up from 42% in 2026. Comscore's flat 33% weekly podcast reach and its 129 million podcast social engagements do not contradict that, but they show reach holding steady rather than expanding while budgets shift.

What the report does not cover

Several things are missing. The deck has no ad spend data, no CPMs and no breakdown of minutes by format or property. It does not name the top 20 properties. Video podcasts are not separated from audio podcasts, and YouTube is mentioned only as a free music service. Audiobook listening gets a single 13% figure. Nothing in the deck addresses AI-generated audio or synthetic voices in ads. And the survey's full questionnaire, which the slide codes such as QADVERTISING4 and QDIFFERENTSERVICES2 refer to, is not published.

The headline the report chose, 13% growth over three years, is accurate. The one it did not print, a 36-billion-minute drop in a single year, is equally supported by its own chart.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Comscore, the US audience measurement company, with TuneIn as research partner. The survey covered 3,242 US audio listeners aged 18 and over; behavioral data came from Comscore Media Metrix, Plan Metrix and Comscore Social.

What: The 27-page State of Audio 2026 report finds that the top 20 US audio properties logged 274 billion minutes in July 2026, 13% above July 2023 but, by PPC Land's calculation, 36 billion below July 2025. Free music-service listeners fell 8.7% and paid subscribers 10.0% year over year in July, while radio and podcast reach held steady. In the survey, 58% prefer free audio with ads, 53% of those who noticed mid-content ads called them disruptive, and 69% would prefer a single audio service. A TuneIn section reports higher self-reported recall and post-ad actions among 365 TuneIn Free users.

When: Comscore emailed the report on October 20, 2026. The PDF is undated on its pages and its metadata shows creation on October 16, 2026. The survey ran in July and August 2026, and an ANA-hosted webinar is set for October 22.

Where: The United States. The survey and all behavioral data cover US adults.

Why: The report supports the long-running case that audio is underbought relative to the time people spend with it, and its findings on relevance align with contextual targeting products Comscore sells. Its action and purchase figures are self-reported, and its own chart shows listening time fell sharply from 2025's level, which leaves the question of whether last year's surge was an exception.