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And Finally Business News Media
Three more years: Grimmy wants to take Chris Moyles’ breakfast show crown
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 4 October 2017
Officially Radio 1’s least favourite Breakfast Show host in history (if you go purely by RAJAR’s listening figures), Nick Grimshaw is hoping to beat his predecessor Chris Moyles’ record for being the longest serving host of the show.
“I’m not usually competitive but I know if I do three more years, I will have done it for longer than Chris. And I thought, ‘That sounds very good'”, Grimmy told The Sun. “The last five years have gone by so quickly, it feels crazy. I was weirdly specific about wanting to do the Breakfast Show, as I thought it was the most fun and free. I wasn’t wrong”.
Moyles presented Radio 1’s flagship show for eight years before handing it over to Grimmy in 2012. Ratings for the show then immediately dropped – though only by 40,000 listeners, which wasn’t too bad, given that Moyles had gone out on a five year low. Five years later, Grimshaw’s ratings are down over a million – though they did rise a bit when the RAJAR people last made up the official numbers.
Grimmy though? Not bothered. While he admits that he does look at the RAJAR figures when they come out, he doesn’t think they’re particularly significant now. He is, you see, toeing the new line that FM radio is just a starting point for making all sorts of super content for young people to listen to.
“It is quite an archaic way to measure something”, he says of the RAJARs. “I pay attention to them a bit, I guess. Even the concept of a kid having a radio is mad! We make ‘content’ rather than have a traditional radio show”.
New research does indeed suggest that young people are not listening to traditional radio very much at all. That’s kind of fine while older demographics are still switching on, and young people are being engaged by broadcasters through other means. Although it may become more problematic if radio listeners all die off and no one’s actually turning on to find out where all that bitesize content actually comes from.
The good news for Grimmy is that all of that will probably take more than three years to become a reality.
