The markets for smart speakers and music streaming are becoming more interdependent, a new study suggests, as high-tech audio shifts the way consumers listen to music.
In data prepared for The Music Business Association and provided exclusively to CNBC on Monday, market research firm AudienceNet said that music services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora are snagging a larger share of music consumption. The findings are part of a study called "Audiomonitor 2018: The Overall Music Listening Landscape," which surveyed 3,000 people over the age of 16.
The trend is also feeding a boom in smart speakers, the study noted. Smart speakers such as Google Home, Apple HomePod and Amazon's Echo are part of a movement that has sent sales of such devices skyrocketing by nearly 200 percent in the second quarter alone, according to a separate study from research firm Canalysis.
AudienceNet found that an estimated 14 percent of the U.S. population now owns a smart speaker, most of which can perform a range of automated tasks — but listening to music is the dominant use case among owners, the firm said. Among those surveyed, Amazon's Echo devices edged out Google and Apple in terms of popularity.
Yet one noteworthy detail found by the study was that 43 percent of smart-speaker owners surveyed by AudienceNet now use on-demand streaming services — and 37 percent of owners started paying for these services after purchasing their device.
AudienceNet's findings bolstered a report published by Adobe in September, which said that by 2019, nearly half of American households will own a smart speaker.
Apple, Google and Samsung are among the brands attempting to capitalize on the growing adoption of smart speakers, which is having a ripple effect on how, when and where music gets played.
In August, Samsung announced a new smart speaker to rival the Echo and HomePod. Called the Galaxy Home, the device was part of a new tie-up with Spotify that let users stream seamlessly across a range of Samsung TVs, phones and the Galaxy Home smart speaker. Spotify is the default music streaming service on the Galaxy Home, too.
Along those lines, "43 percent of smart speaker owners also agreed that using their device increased the amount of music playlists they listen to, while around 40 percent discovered more music and 38 percent listened to a broader range of music than they did previously," AudienceNet said.
Meanwhile, 73 percent of smart-speaker owners say that owning their device has "changed the way they listen to music," the firm said, with half of them agreeing that they listened to more music and spent longer listening since acquiring their device.
While AM/FM radio is still the most popular listening service in the U.S. at 31 percent of total listening time, on-demand streaming accounted for 27 percent of overall music consumption, AudienceNet found. Radio listening accounted for only 12 percent of listening among 16- to 24-year-olds, the study showed.
Amid the proliferation of mobile devices, smartphones were the most used in consuming music, with the study showing smartphones accounted for 25 percent of all music played.
— CNBC's Todd Haselton contributed to this report.