Edison Media Research has released several studies over the last two months that demonstrate the growing use – and therefore the potential for widespread outreach – of Internet radio and podcasts.

According to Edison's 2008 edition of the annual Infinite Dial: Radio's Digital Platforms, 33 million people aged 12 and above listen to Internet radio each week. This means that approximately 13 percent of Americans listen to Internet radio each week, and 21 percent (or 54 million) listen each month. This represents a 2 percent growth in total listenership from 2007.

The demographics are pretty evenly divided between men and women – 52 percent of listeners are male, while 48 percent are female – but there is currently a decided majority in listeners aged 25-44 (45 percent of all listeners). Listeners ages 12-24 make up 24 percent of all listeners, while listeners ages 45-64 make up 27 percent of listeners.

CHRIST IS RISEN!

Today's episode of "Icons in Sound" features two beautiful CDs, both of which originate in Ekaterinburg, in the Ural mountain region of Russia. Thanks to a very fortuitous collaboration between the two monastic communities responsible for producing the CDs and the academic and artistic community-an extremely rare phenomenon in the Orthodox world-Ekaterinburg has emerged as a place where the liturgical arts, and particularly liturgical music, are cultivated with extraordinary zeal and on a very high level of excellence. The choir of Sisters of the Novo-Tikhvinsky Monastery is coached by one of the faculty members of the conservatory choral department, while the men's choir of the Monastery of the All-Merciful Savior has as its consultant and member, Maestro Valery Kopanev, the Artistic Director and Conductor of the Domestik Municipal Choir of Ekaterinburg, one of the outstanding professional choral ensembles in Russia today.