This chapter examines young people's use of audio media – radio, tapes, and CDs. It considers how much time kids are exposed to audio media, as well as what they listen to. For the most part, U.S. youth conceive of audio media as music media. There is, of course, some exposure to such radio formats as news and talk, and there is some use of tapes or CDs to listen to stories or for instructional purposes. But typically, when children and especially adolescents talk about listening to the radio or some kind of recording, they are talking about listening to music. For young people in the U.S. today, audio media are, fundamentally, music media.

It is difficult to obtain accurate estimates of time spent listening to radio or recordings. One of audio media's most important distinguishing characteristics is that they so conveniently operate in the background – as a secondary or even tertiary activity. Consider, for example, that young children often play in the family room or living room to the sound of a parent's favorite album or a sibling's portable radio. Or imagine teenagers driving to a football game arguing animatedly about what to do after the game, while a local “alternative” rock station booms from the car radio. Meanwhile, the football team is in the gym, changing from street clothes to football pads to the reverberations of a rapper emanating at maximum volume from the locker room boom-box. And, of course, it is a rare adolescent who does not do homework with some kind of music in the background. Indeed, we suspect that many readers of this paragraph do so accompanied by music. In short, more often than not, people are exposed to audio media while they do something else – drive, work, read, chat with friends, surf the web, and so on.

It is precisely because audio media function so well as a background activity that the time young people spend with radio and recordings is difficult to measure.