Live radio remains Australia's king of the road in the streaming age

Despite the boom in smartphones and streaming music services, it seems we still favour the old-fashioned radio when we jump behind the wheel.

If you're old enough to drive then you've probably grown up with the idea that mobile data needs to be rationed, although the recent jump in Australians exceeding their monthly caps shows that not everyone has learned their lesson. While there are plenty of ways to hook up your phone to your car's sound system, live radio still accounts for 80% of our in-car listening, according to Commercial Radio Australia's figures taken from GfK's 2016 Australian Share of Audio Study.

Those figures seem fairly healthy for an industry which faces growing competition, although you can't read too much into these in-car stats without looking at the age demographics to see if older listeners are skewing the numbers. Commercial Radio Australia says an age breakdown isn't available for in-car listening, but as a whole the 1000-person study is balanced across the age groups in line with the country's demographics.

It would be interesting to know how much of that 80% in-car live radio figure is propped up by over 50s who are rusted on listeners, similar to free-to-air television viewing stats. While the television networks insist that they're not threatened by growing competition, they're sitting on a demographic time bomb with live television viewing figures plunging more than 10% last year for Australians aged under 35.

So if 80% of our in-car listening is live radio, what are we listening to the rest of the time?

• 12% "Owned music" – which include tapes and CDs as well as digital downloads, perhaps from a phone or USB stick
• 3.7% "Podcasts" – although it's not clear whether these are streamed or downloaded in advance
• 3% "Streaming services" – which covers subscription services like Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora
• 1.3% Miscellaneous – including audio books, online videos and television

There's obviously a margin for error once you get into those small percentages – free internet radio stations from the likes of Shoutcast are an interesting omission from this list, although they might fall under streaming alongside paid services like Spotify. It's also not clear how much of streaming's 3% comes via offline playback mode, with people downloading music into their smartphone app so they don't chew through mobile data when they're out and about – which is what I do with Google Play Music.

Of course not all streaming music has to come via your smartphone, as some new cars have services like Spotify built into their entertainment system. You're probably still relying on your phone to supply the internet access, although some vehicles let you slip a SIM card into the dashboard.

There are plenty of ways to connect your phone to your car – lately I've been testing out Belkin's new Charge Rockstar Lightning Audio double adaptor so I can connect an iPhone to both the cigarette lighter and the stereo's auxiliary input – but whatever method you use it's also worth investing in a car mount so you can keep your hands on the wheel.