Alan Burns and Associates have released more results from the company's third annual national study of female radio listeners, titled "Here She Comes 2012 - Insights into Women, Radio, and New Media." According to the latest release from the survey, iHeartRadio's awareness and usage is growing at a faster rate than Pandora.

Burns and Associates unveiled the Digital Battleground portion of its annual study of women radio listeners on Thursday in the second of four webinars. According to Burns SVP Jeff Johnson, "iHeart’s awareness grew five times faster than Pandora’s in the past year, and while Pandora usage increased 10 percentage points, iHeart’s nearly doubled. Pandora has a significant lead in both measures, but iHeart is catching up fast. That shows the power of radio, when it’s focused, to drive awareness of a new product." 

"Personalized music streams are not what women say is limiting their radio usage," commented Burns. "After time spent watching television, women cite ‘too many commercials’ as their radio usage limiter. And commercials are a big factor in the growth of personal stream usage. The top two advantages of personalized music streams for women are customization and fewer commercials. These women think they hear about 80% fewer commercials in personalized streams." 

Burns noted that the move by cell phone carriers away from unlimited data plans will likely have beneficial effects for radio over time. "As Verizon and others move from unlimited to pay-per-minute buckets, it’s going to attach a specific cost to listening to streaming music on your phone and/or in your car," he said, "and we’ve seen in our data that very few women are willing to pay to listen. Radio over the air will still be free, and thus in an even better competitive position than it is now."

Next week, Burns will release Top 40-specific data in a webinar entitled "Deep Dive into Top 40." Burns and Associates researched the attitudes toward and usage of media and music as well as the personal interests of over 2,000 women who listen to AC or CHR radio. Burns is releasing the results of the 2012 study in a series of four free webinars presented by Triton Digital.