Power of mobile penetration: 76% of India listen to FM radio on cell phones

With increasing mobile phone penetration, almost 76 per cent of consumers listen to FM radio using their mobile phones, according to a study.

"An average of 22.5 per cent of them listened to the radio while driving, while another 36 per cent used the radio at home. With mobile phone penetration growing in rural India, radio as a medium of mass communication is now reaching the remotest corners of the country via the mobile phone," the study conducted by AZ Research said.

The survey conducted across 23 cities - Jaipur, Pune, Nagpur, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Bareilly, Varanasi, Agra, Gorakhpur, Ranchi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Coimbatore, Vizag, Surat, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Hisar, Jalandhar, Karnal, Lucknow and Ahmednagar - covered over 7,000 respondents.

All the respondents considered good music as a motivator to tune into a radio station, while 83 per cent of them thought the quality of programmes aired highly impacted their frequency of listening on a particular station.

In terms of listenership, the study found that Radio City topped the list with a listenership of 5.2 crore followed by Radio Mirchi and Big FM with 4 crore and 2.6 crore, respectively.