Once more, this post is brought to you in association with RALF from DP Software and Services. I’ve used RALF for the past 9 years, and it’s my favourite RAJAR analysis tool. So I am delighted that I continue to be able to bring you this RAJAR analysis in association with RALF. For more details on the product, contact Deryck Pritchard via this link or phone 07545 425677.

All views here are my own!

The first RAJAR release of 2017 represents the results of radio listening at the end of 2016, measuring up to and including the week before Christmas.

In overall terms, radio remains strong. 90% of the population listen to the radio at least once a week, listening for an average of 21.5 hours a week – just over three hours a day. The average age of a radio listener is 47 (excluding under 15s as RAJAR does), and all these have been pretty constant over time. But who “won” RAJAR, as I was asked in the office today?

National and Digital Services

Well it’s not Radio 1. The station is down in reach and hours, down 3.2% in reach on the quarter and down 7.4% in reach on the year. Hours figures are slightly better. Radio 1 will of course point you towards their online successes including their YouTube channel. But they’re in tough position, as are many stations aimed at a younger audience. As I mentioned in a piece on some separate RAJAR Midas research last week, 15-24s are far likelier to be using streaming services. That also means, incidentally, that Radio 1 will continue to struggle to try to drag its average age down from 35 (Again remembering the under 15s aren’t really counted).

Radio 2 probably isn’t the “winner” either. I mean, it is in the sense that it’s by far the biggest station in the country, but reach was a fraction off this quarter, down 0.6% on the quarter and down 2.7% on the year. Hours were up though, to back over 180m a week.

Radio 3 did well this quarter, up on all measures – notably up 7.2% in reach and 17.0% in hours on last quarter, the best the station has had in 14 years. But the overall winner?

Radio 4 did very too. It’s reach was fractionally up on last quarter and 3.7% up on last year. And it has recorded its best ever listening hours under the current methodology (which goes back as far as 1999), up 8.4% on last quarter to 133m.

I would think that you would squarely put that down to a tumultuous political period both at home and abroad.

I think Radio 4 may have a strong shout.

Five Live did very well too, perhaps for very similar reasons. While it’s audience wasn’t record breaking like Radio 4’s, reach was up 3.8% on the quarter while hours were up 4.6%. A new football season won’t have harmed things, but either way, this was a very solid result for the station.

At some point 6 Music is probably going to have to stop breaking records, but it hasn’t reached that point yet. While its reach was fractionally down on last quarter’s record size, it is still 5.8% up in reach terms on the year. More to the point it now has record hours, with more than 23m, up 6.5% on the quarter and a massive 15.1% on the year. The average 6 Music listener is 43 and listens for a record 10 hours a week.

Radio 4 Extra had a good quarter, up 6.9% in reach and 10.7% in hours on the last quarter. On the other hand, without nearly as much cricket, Five Live Sports Extra’s performance plummeted downwards.

Absolute Radio had a pretty awful quarter, down 19.0% in reach and down 13.8% in hours. But this came after a record breaking quarter last time, and their current figures are still both up on the year – suggesting that last quarter’s results were, how shall we put this politely, “freak.” The station still performs well.

Absolute 80s, its biggest digital brand climbed after last quarter’s slight dips. The station was up 4.9% in reach and 10.8% in hours on last quarter. But it’s still down from where it was a year ago, down 3.5% in reach and 4.5% in hours. Undoubtedly a consequence of switching from D1 to D2 as I’ve mentioned in the past.

Classic FM had a fairly uneventful set of results down in a few measures but up in reach on the quarter. The station performs consistently well with just over 5m listeners and around 35m listening hours. With an average of 6.6 hours per listener, this is in line with recent RAJAR results. Go back a few years and it was over 7 hours, and the station might like to get people listening a bit longer.

LBC reports itself nationally on a six month basis, and its latest signing, I think you know who, only started presenting this quarter. I’m slightly surprised to see its reach and hours were down quarter on quarter, reach down 6.4% and hours down 3.6%. This obviously came after the Brexit vote. However, post the referendum, it’s clear that Radio 4 has done very well as people try to understand what it actually means. So I’m surprised the station has fallen back a little. Perhaps LBC’s audience preferred the run-up to the referendum, while the Radio 4 audience needed to then make sense of it. I’m probably being too simplistic. However LBC is still well up on the year, 17.2% in reach and 25.4% in hours.

TalkSport’s results are a little mixed with reach up to over 3m again (up 5.3% on the quarter), after dipping just below that last time. But hours are back down to 18.3m after a couple of quarter at over 21m hours. Colin Murray left the station in this period, and that had a knock-on shake-up among talent. Average hours are still above six.

TalkSport 2 is continuing to improve however. In its third set of results it has its best reach to date at 294,000, although hours slipped a little. The station is performing consistently, and will take time to grow.

The other new stations that Wireless Group launched on D2 last year are suffering a little however. TalkRadio was well down on both reach and hours from last quarter, with a reach of 252,000 and 615,000 hours. Average listening of only 2.4 hours per listener is very low for a speech station. Virgin Radio is also down with 324,000 reach and 758,000 hours. I suspect that what both of these are going to need is some serious investment in marketing. Picking up a recent copy of Saturday’s Times, I did notice a Virgin Radio ad in the Saturday Review section. I’m not sure the extent to which News UK’s newspapers are providing advertising space for these radio services, but I suspect that continued marketing investment is going to be needed.

Kiss saw some decent results with an increase in reach by 1.1% and hours up 7.4% to 22.7m, while Magic saw dips in reach on both the quarter and the year nationally, while hours were up on the quarter and down on the year.

Radio X nationally saw it’s reach fall back a modest amount on the quarter, but still be up 2.4% on the year. In terms of hours it’s up 2.2% on the quarter and a mighty 34.4% on the year.

In terms of the big networks, the Capital Network was down slightly this quarter (-3.3% in reach and -2.6% in hours), but up on the year (+3.9% in reach and +4.3% in hours). The Heart Brand was basically flat from last quarter which is when it was introduced as a measurement with the addition of the new Heart Extra (which itself did not have a happy second result).

The Big City Network has been in the news over the last couple of days, following the publication of some very restrictive sounding style guidelines that were published on social media. In RAJAR terms, the stations’ performance this quarter was pretty flat.

The Absolute Radio Network reported its largest ever reach with over 4.5m (up 1.3% on the quarter and up 3.3% on the year). Notably Absolute Radio 90s and Absolute Radio Classic Rock both had record reach figures this quarter too. Could 90s be the new 80s?

Breakfast

I won’t say too much about breakfast except to report some of the bigger changes. Nick Grimshaw had some good results for this quarter, being up 2.2% despite Radio 1’s overall fall in reach. Chris Evans also increased his reach slightly on the quarter, although like Grimshaw, he was down on the year.

The Today Programme on Radio 4 was up 11.7% on the quarter and 20.3% on the year, to nearly 7.5m listeners a day. This undoubtedly reflects Radio 4’s overall audience increase as mentioned above.

Christian O’Connell had another set of record reach figures in spite of falls on the main station. He’s tantalisingly close to 2m daily. But Rickie, Melvin and Charlie have the biggest national commercial breakfast show with over 2.2m, up 20% on the previous quarter. Melvin Odoom, of course, had mixed luck in this period being kicked off Strictly in the first week of the 2016 season, but returning to win the Christmas special. So it’s hard to say what impact that may or may not have had on the show.

Chris Moyles on Radio X continues to pick up listeners slowly but surely with 717,000 this quarter, up 2.0% on last quarter and up 7.2% on last year.

London

The biggest commercial station in London is Kiss, with 1.86m listeners – up on last quarter but down on the year. Capital just pips Magic for second place, although it has fallen below 2m again with its lowest reach since 2007. Magic has also seen its reach fall this quarter.

Next largest is Heart, although it’s figures are in freefall right now – down 19.1% on the quarter and 24.3% on the year. I’d wait another quarter to thoroughly check there’s a trend, but it really does seem there is.

Of note is the fact that Radio X has increased its reach this period to 430,000 – up 13.8% on the quarter. It’s still down on the year, and it feels that there’s work to be done there.

Commercially, breakfast in London is all over the place, with nearly every breakfast show changing a double-digit percentage from last quarter. And none of them have over a million listeners. That’s not a healthy state of affairs.

The best placed is the Kiss breakfast show with 983,000, up 15.2% on the quarter (although down on the year). It leads the Capital breakfast show by just over a million. Dave Berry is down 15.4% on the quarter and 18.4% on the year. Of course, he is shortly off from Capital to Absolute Radio, so it’ll be really interesting to see who Capital gets. Will it be a reshuffle of the current deck, or will they look for a personality not necessarily known for radio?

Magic is third biggest, and shows the smallest change in the market, being up just 5%. LBC is fourth, and shows good growth being up 16.2% on the quarter and 4.3% on the year.

Heart’s breakfast show really isn’t performing too well right now. Jamie and Emma are down 18.6% on the quarter and 29.3% on the year. And while Christian O’Connell had an excellent result nationally, his London figures are poor, down 16.2% on the quarter and 10.4% down on the year.

I confess that I’m slightly concerned about a small trend in under 35s not listening to the radio at breakfast at all.

I’ve kept the chart’s base at 0 to be fair, but note a very gentle downward’s slope, and a sudden extremeness in variability towards the latter period of the chart. Something to watch.

Digital Listening

Digital listening is down very fractionally to 45.2%, and reach is at 57.9%, but neither is especially concerning. Next quarter will add some new Christmas devices into the mix, and will probably bring some continued growth.

Others

There are always a couple of new stations in RAJAR, and this quarter is no exception. Perhaps most notably, Thames Radio is being measured for the first time. The service is available on DAB in London and online, featuring some very famous radio names from yesteryear including Neil Fox, Pat Sharp and Tony Blackburn amongst others. Their first RAJAR sees a reach of 15,000 and hours of 13,000, which must be said, is a disappointing set of results.

Bubbles

On Tuesday this week came the news that Hans Rosling, statistician and professor of global health, had died aged 68. He had a way of making dry sound statistical stories vibrant with his presentation technique and imaginative charting won him world fame. He presented TED Talk videos and a couple of BBC documentaries. All are worth checking out.

There was a nice piece on The Today Programme on Radio 4 yesterday with Evan Davis and Professor David Spiegelhalter of the Royal Statistical Society, talking about the impact he had as a statistical storyteller.

Specifically, working with Gapminder, he developed a way to animate data using bubble charts to help tell some of those statistical stories. Those who have been reading my RAJAR blogs over time, may recall I used to publish RAJAR charts using those animation techniques on this page – bubble charts. I only really stopped because they were becoming a little too unwieldy, and Google Charts weren’t properly able to cope with the underlying volume of data.

However, I thought that it was worth bringing back at least a cut down version of one of these charts following Rosling’s death. So the bubbles are sort of back.

The below chart tracks a selection of national radio stations and brands over time. I’ve limited the list to those who report quarterly data.

(If you’re attempting to see this on a mobile… well good luck! Try a laptop later on.)

So you know what you’re looking at, in the default settings as I’ve published it, the x-axis is the average age, while the y-axis displays % male. So a station in the top right-hand corner would be an elderly male station, while a station in the bottom left would be a young female station.

The size of the circle is related to that service’s total hours.

If you hit the big “play” button, you can watch the stations shift and change slightly over time.

Probably the most interesting station to watch is 6 Music as it gets larger and very slightly older over time.

As I say, I’ve by no means included every station, and in particular those that I’ve chosen are national three-month services. Perhaps I’ll return to a bigger version of this another time.

Further Reading

For more RAJAR analysis, I’d recommend the following sites:

The official RAJAR site and their infographic is here
Radio Today for a digest of all the main news
Go to Media.Info for lots of numbers and charts
Paul Easton for more lots analysis including London charts
Matt Deegan will have some great analysis
Media Guardian for more news and coverage
The BBC Mediacentre for BBC Radio stats and findings
Bauer Media’s corporate site.
Global Radio’s corporate site.

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos MORI/RSMB, period ending 18 December 2016, Adults 15+.

Disclaimer: These are my views alone and do not represent those of anyone else, including my employer. Any errors (I hope there aren’t any!) are mine alone. Drop me a note if you want clarifications on anything. Access to the RAJAR data is via RALF from DP Software as mentioned at the top of this post.