I began to research into Radio dramas so I could pin point who the main audience for them are

and
what this audience mainly likes to listen to, I visited various different sites as part of my secondary
research and found out the non shocking news that the majority of radio drama listeners are 65 plus
years old, this doesn’t surprise me as it’s probably the fact that listening to a radio drama is like re-
visiting childhood for them and rather nostalgic, while for more recent generations radio dramas are
a very niche thing to enjoy when you have modern day technology to use instead. I think a large
factor in the audience for radio dramas overall is
how the individual was brought up, if you were
brought up in a technologically profound home
then you most likely are going to be drawn
towards visual entertainment, where as if your
older you and you didn’t have access to the
technological advancements we have today then
you’ll know what you know and probably stick
with it (hence why the majority of radio drama
listeners are part of an older generation).

I also looked in to podcasts which are currently

sweeping the globe and rapidly picking up listeners, podcasts are a lot more versatile when it comes
to age groups with a large percentage of listeners being within the age category of 13-34, while also
having young listeners there’s a vast amount of older
listeners too. With podcasts there’s arguably a wider
range of genres and topics to listen to, with the choices
going from comedy to the other side of the spectrum
where you can listen to an intellectual podcast this could
go from talking about Shakespeare’s work to modern
medicine and just how far we’ve come in such a short
space of time.

BBCs Radio 4 is known for the radio dramas that it runs, some have been running for many years, I
looked into some of the statistics about their listeners. I
found out 11.55 people tune into radio 4 on a weekly basis, this
is a staggering 21.2% of the population! Radio offers a
variety of different genres to their audience with news
being the most popular; Drama attracts 6.96 million people
which are a lot of people for such a niche form of
entertainment.

For my primary research I sent out a short survey to my target audience and asked them some
questions so I could get a glimpse in to other young people’s opinions on radio dramas, the feedback
I received was expected with the majority of responses saying that they had never listened to a radio
drama before, I expected this already from my previous research. I also wanted to look into the
personal preference of young people with 67% of people saying they would like to listen to romance
over comedy, sci-fi and horror. Young people now days have busy schedules so asking where these
young people would listen to radio dramas was an important question the majority said in bed which
made sense as this is an ideal place to relax. I
asked the key question ‘do you think a lot of radio
dramas appeal to young people?’ with the all
except 1 saying no, an exact quote from one of
the responses is ‘there is nothing to watch and it gets a bit boring’ showing that this generation
prefers to have visual entertainments as well as audio.

Overall from my research I concluded that there aren’t many places for young people to find a radio
drama that they would be interested in listening to as radio 4s content is directed at an older
audience this might fit the average 54 year old listener but say someone whose 17 might have a
much more current and different taste compared to someone in that age group. I have learnt that
there needs to be a place where young people can conveniently listen to radio dramas that have a
variety of genres that appeal towards them.