Edison Research today published new data from its Share of Ear measurement program showing that Americans between the ages of 13 and 34 spend more daily time with audio than any other age group in the United States. The figures, drawn from Q1 2026 data collected through the Share of Ear survey, place the 13-34 cohort at four hours and thirty minutes of audio consumption per day. That number sits above both the 35-54 group and the 55-and-older bracket, which logged four hours and three minutes and three hours and seventeen minutes respectively.

The figures were released today, May 6, 2026, as part of Edison's Weekly Insights newsletter.

What Share of Ear measures

Share of Ear, launched by Edison Research in 2014, is described by the company as the only audio measurement tool that tracks all listening platforms simultaneously. According to Edison Research, total daily audio time among Americans ages 13 and older has hovered around four hours since the program began. That overall stability masks, however, significant divergence when the data is broken down by generation.

The measurement counts a wide range of audio sources. According to the report, daily time spent listening to audio includes consumption of AM/FM radio and radio streams, streaming music, music videos on YouTube, podcasts(including video podcasts), SiriusXM, owned music, audiobooks, and TV music channels. This breadth is part of what distinguishes Share of Ear from narrower panel studies that focus on a single platform or format category.

The numbers by age group

The Q1 2026 data produces a straightforward hierarchy. According to Edison Research, 13-34 year-olds spend four hours and thirty minutes with audio daily. People between the ages of 35 and 54 follow at four hours and three minutes - a difference of twenty-seven minutes. Americans 55 and older come in at three hours and seventeen minutes, trailing the youngest cohort by one hour and thirteen minutes.

The gap between the youngest and oldest groups is notable given the common assumption that older Americans, who grew up with radio as a primary entertainment medium, might sustain the highest audio consumption levels. The data suggests the opposite. The 13-34 group, which has grown up alongside streaming platforms, on-demand podcast libraries, and music video consumption through YouTube, now dedicates more clock time to audio than any generation before it - at least as measured by Share of Ear's multi-platform methodology.

The 35-54 middle cohort sits just twenty-seven minutes behind the leading group. That proximity matters: it means a large portion of the working-age adult population also consumes audio at very high daily rates. According to Edison Research, this group spends a "significant portion of their day with audio." The language used - "significant portion" and "respectable amount" for the 55-plus group - signals that even the trailing segment shows substantial engagement, not disengagement.

Methodology and what it counts

The inclusion of music videos on YouTube alongside traditional radio streams and on-demand podcasts reflects how audio consumption in 2026 rarely follows a single-channel path. A listener might start a morning with AM/FM radio during a commute, shift to a streaming music service at a desk, watch a video podcast over lunch, and end the evening with an audiobook. Share of Ear's design attempts to capture the full arc of that day rather than isolating one segment.

This multi-source approach also means the four-hour-plus figures are not attributable to any single platform. The data does not break down, in the publicly released portion, what fraction of the 13-34 cohort's four hours and thirty minutes comes from YouTube music videos versus podcast audio versus streaming music. That level of granularity is available through a full subscription to the Share of Ear dataset, which Edison notes also lets subscribers understand how time is divided among various platforms, locations, and types of content.

Why this matters for marketers and advertisers

The generational audio consumption data arrives at a moment when the advertising industry faces persistent questions about how much of its budget actually follows audience attention into audio channels.

As PPC Land has documented extensively, audio accounts for 31% of consumers' total media time but receives only 9% of advertising budgets - a 22-percentage-point gap. The Share of Ear findings from Q1 2026 add another dimension to that picture: the heaviest audio consumers are 13-34 year-olds, a demographic that advertisers routinely treat as a primary target. If the youngest and most-engaged audio listeners are spending four and a half hours per day with the medium, the discrepancy between consumption and investment becomes harder to justify on audience grounds alone.

The 22% gap has been a central data point in audio advertising discussions throughout 2024 and 2025. Programmatic audio infrastructure has expanded substantially in response, with platforms and technology providers attempting to make audio inventory easier to buy, target, and measure. Edison's Q1 2026 Share of Ear figures reinforce the consumption side of that equation, showing that the audience has not gone anywhere.

For media planners specifically, the breakdown by age group provides a clearer picture of where different demographics actually spend their audio time. The 35-54 group's four-hours-and-three-minute daily figure means this working-age audience is nearly as accessible via audio as the 13-34 cohort. The 55-plus group, at three hours and seventeen minutes, still exceeds three hours per day - a figure that would register as substantial engagement in almost any other medium.

Nielsen and Edison Research previously collaborated on a quarterly audio report called The Record, which PPC Land covered in August 2024. That Q2 2024 data showed Americans spending an average of four hours and five minutes daily with audio content - a figure largely consistent with the new Share of Ear data for the overall 13-plus population. The new Q1 2026 release drills further into age-group differentiation than the earlier collaborative reports.

The 13-34 cohort as an audio-first generation

Several structural factors help explain why 13-34 year-olds now lead in daily audio time. Podcast consumption among this age group has grown steadily since the mid-2010s. Edison Research data released in April 2024 showed that 47% of Americans aged 12 and older had listened to a podcast in the past month, with weekly listeners representing 34% of the population - figures that have continued trending upward into 2026.

YouTube has become central to audio consumption for this age group in ways that earlier measurement systems did not fully capture. Edison's methodology includes music videos on YouTube as an audio source, recognizing that a significant share of music and podcast content is accessed through the platform in audio-only or background-play contexts. That inclusion pushes the 13-34 totals higher than they might appear in studies counting only dedicated audio apps.

Video podcasts compound this dynamic. According to Edison Research data cited in podcast ranking methodology changes in 2025, the company updated its podcast measurement to incorporate data from individuals whose sole podcast consumption occurred through video platforms. The 13-34 cohort, which gravitates toward YouTube as a primary content discovery surface, disproportionately represents that video-podcast consumption pattern.

Context from the wider audio market

The Q1 2026 Share of Ear release comes as the audio advertising and measurement ecosystem has been actively reorganizing itself. Nielsen and Edison partnered in August 2025 to integrate Edison Podcast Metrics into Nielsen's unified media planning infrastructure - a move designed to make podcast audience data accessible within the same planning environment as television and digital campaigns.

SiriusXM recently struck a deal that makes it the exclusive advertising representative for YouTube audio inventory in the United States, a partnership announced April 22, 2026, targeting the more than 212 million monthly listeners who engage with audio-first content on YouTube. That deal draws on the same underlying insight Edison's Share of Ear data surfaces: younger Americans use YouTube as a primary audio platform, not merely a video one.

The IAB released a comprehensive guide in June 2025 on measuring digital audio in Media Mix Models, attempting to address a cycle where low investment limits data availability, which in turn makes attribution harder. The Q1 2026 consumption figures give that effort more urgency. An audience that spends four-and-a-half hours daily with audio is large enough that measurement failures represent a real misallocation problem for advertisers.

Share of Ear as a research product

Edison describes Share of Ear as the only single-source measure of all audio in the United States. The dataset covers not just what people listen to, but also where - whether at home, in a car, at work, or in other locations - and across which specific platforms and content types. The full subscription product breaks down time spent by format and platform, making it useful for competitive analysis among audio platforms as well as for media planning purposes.

The program has operated continuously since 2014, meaning the Q1 2026 release sits within a twelve-year data series. That longitudinal depth allows for trend analysis that newer measurements cannot replicate. Edison has used this history to anchor broad claims about the stability of total audio time - the "around four hours" figure for 13-plus Americans - while revealing meaningful movement within the age-group breakdown.

The age-group differential documented in Q1 2026 is, in Edison's framing, a finding about where the overall four-hour average comes from. Younger Americans are pulling the average up. Older Americans sit below it. The middle cohort tracks close to the mean. That structure has implications for how platforms and advertisers think about growth: audio time among 55-plus Americans has room to expand relative to current levels, while the 13-34 cohort appears to have established audio as a dominant media habit already.

Whether the 13-34 figure continues rising, plateaus, or compresses as the cohort ages into the 35-54 bracket will be a question the next several quarters of Share of Ear data can address. For now, the Q1 2026 numbers establish a clear picture of who spends the most time with audio in the United States - and it is the youngest measured group, spending more than a quarter of every waking day with some form of audio content running.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Edison Research, a U.S.-based research firm that has conducted the Infinite Dial survey series since 1998 and operates Share of Ear as its continuous audio measurement program.

What: Q1 2026 data from Share of Ear shows that 13-34 year-olds in the United States spend four hours and thirty minutes per day with audio - more than any other age group. The 35-54 group follows at four hours and three minutes, and Americans 55 and older log three hours and seventeen minutes. The measurement covers AM/FM radio and streams, streaming music, music videos on YouTube, podcasts including video podcasts, SiriusXM, owned music, audiobooks, and TV music channels.

When: The data covers Q1 2026 and was published May 6, 2026, in Edison Research's Weekly Insights newsletter.

Where: The figures apply to the United States. Share of Ear measures audio consumption among Americans ages 13 and older, providing the data on a continuous basis since 2014.

Why: The findings matter because they quantify where the heaviest audio consumers sit on the age spectrum. With advertisers allocating only 9% of budgets to audio despite the medium commanding 31% of media time, the identification of 13-34 year-olds as the highest-consumption group adds demographic precision to a long-running argument about audio's underrepresentation in media plans.

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