7am this morning saw the first RAJAR release of 2009, and with it came a pleasant surprise: overall radio listening is up. Indeed, since the current methodology was introduced, radio listening is at an all time high reaching 45.8m listeners a week with 251,000 additional listeners this quarter.
And even better news is that listening – the amount of time people actually spend listening to radio – is also up with 1.025 billion listening hours.

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos MORI/RSMB
This is great news, because we all have so many more options for watching, reading and listening than we’ve ever had in the past. I’ve long been concerned that radio would fall below the 1 billion hours a week figure, but the numbers remain strong. A number’s just a number, but when we could be listening to our iPods, Last.fm, or Spotify, we could playing video games, surfing the net or watching a DVD, this is powerful news for the medium.
I suppose that it’d be fair to point out that as the population continues to increase, and get older, you’d hope that listening figures increase, but irrespective of that this remains good news. The one area of concern is amongst younger listeners.
That’s up 1% on the quarter in terms of listening hours, but it’s down on the year. This chart shows listening over the last five years.

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos MORI/RSMB
Keeping young people listening to the radio should be a major industry objective. 25+ year olds are well served by both the BBC and commercial radio. But is the industry really doing enough to get young listeners involved? Kids radio is all but non-existant, with CBeebies is on Radio 7 between the hours of 5am and 8am, and Radio 4 just killed its only childrens’ show. There is just Fun Kids operating as a full service station for youngsters.
Radio 1 has grown older over the years with only really Switch specifically targeted at the younger end of its market, and even then it’s not that young (The Radio Academy is discussing this next week).
20.1% of all radio listening is now via a digital platform – one in five hours. For some stations this is much higher – my own employer, Absolute Radio has now reached 50% of listening via a digital platform for its National service – i.e. amongst all listening to it excluding FM in London.

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos MORI/RSMB
That 20.1% is made up of 12.7% DAB, 3.4% DTV and 2.2% Internet (The mathematically astute will notice that doesn’t add up to 20.1%. The remainer didn’t specify which digital platform they were listening via).
From a commercial perspective we must be disappointed that the share of listening has slipped back in favour of the BBC. The BBC has 56.3% of listening while commercial radio has 41.6% (the difference is other listening including non-RAJAR services, and international listening, including via the internet).
Overall, with so many more distractions, it’s good news that radio is still being listened to so much, by so many people.
As always, these views are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.