Media

Have a RAJAR round up on us

By | Published on Thursday 28 October 2010

You might think I just sit down of a morning and write this shit off the top of my head, but no, I do research.

And what I discovered is that my mum and dad don’t dig Chris Evans in the morning, but returned to Radio 2 recently when Richard Madeley filled in on the BBC station’s breakfast show. Whereas the noisy women on my train back from Manchester the other week didn’t like Richard, and prefer it when Evans is on air. There were three of them, whereas my mum and dad number two, so Evans attracts more listeners than he loses as host of the Radio 2 breakfast show. Here ends my in-depth analysis of British radio listening.

Though I do have to admit that my findings do not concur with that other in-depth analysis of British radio listening, the all important RAJAR listening figures, which arguably aren’t all that much more reliable than my approach to research, but which have a lot more credibility in the broadcasting industry. Because, according to the latest set of RAJAR figures, released today, Evans puts off as many listeners as he attracts. 

That is to say, for each of the 1.5 million new listeners Evans brought in when he took over Radio 2 breakfast earlier this year, he’s caused an existing Radio 2 breakfast listener to turn off. So whereas Evans initially took the Radio 2 breakfast audience to record levels at the start of the year, he now has more or less the same number of listeners that his predecessor Terry Wogan had this time last year (actually, slightly less). Still, at 8.14 million listeners, he still has by far the biggest radio audience in the UK. Chris Moyles lags behind on 7.1 million, a figure down over half a million on the previous quarter but up slightly year on year.

Radio 2 remains the UK’s most popular radio station overall, with a weekly reach of over 13.5 million, while Radio 1, in second place, reaches just over 11.5 million. Over in commercial radio, TalkSport had a very good quarter with audience up 19.6% year on year to 2.96 million. Absolute Radio also saw audience growth, by 4.2% year on year, to 1.65 million. But the biggest commercial station remains Classic FM which, while seeing a slight drop in weekly audience, is still pulling in 5.68 million listeners a week.

Digital radio listening grew again, albeit slightly, in the last quarter, with 24.8% of all radio listening being done via a digital platform, up from 24.6% in the last quarter and 21.1% this time last year. That said, the growth was really in the number of people listening to radio through their telly (which counts as a digital platform), listening via the DAB digital network and via the internet were both down.

In the digital domain, it was another good RAJAR report for 6music which, thanks to being very nearly shut down earlier this year, now has almost twice as many listeners compared to this time last year, at 1.12 million. On the commercial side of digital, Planet Rock saw its audience rise 10.5% year on year to its highest ever level of 783,000.



READ MORE ABOUT: | | | | | | |