Here’s an interesting point. With each quarter’s RAJAR releases comes a report that details how stations’ listening is broken down by platforms.
It’s this report that tells us that 21.1% of all listening on All Radio is digital, and that for all BBC Radio it’s 21.6% while for all Commercial Radio it’s 20.2%.
And, because Absolute Radio is happy to let everyone know, I can also tell you that Total Absolute Radio has reached 30.5% of digital listening, while Absolute Radio National (ie. excluding FM listening in London) has achieved 51.5% of listening being via a digital platform.
But I can’t tell you much more because of publishing rules surrounding RAJAR data which state that stations may not publish competitors’ platform data. There are good reasons for this rule being in place, although some stations, including my own, like to trumpet this data.
Yesterday, however, Paul Donovan of The Sunday Times, published more data than I’ve previously seen in the public domain.
(Interesting sidenote here: I’d love to link to Donovan’s piece which is well worth reading in its entirety, but either because of Rupert Murdoch’s overall disdain for the internet and his disliking of giving articles away free, or because The Sunday Times simply doesn’t upload everything, I’ve been unable to find the piece on their website. I’ve seen a PDF of it via my employer’s clippings service, but I can’t reproduce the whole piece here for obvious copyright reasosns. I’ve therefore embedded just the relevant paragraph.)

The only problem is that one of those figures is wrong. I’d love to tell you which figure is incorrect, but that’d be breaking the RAJAR Publication Code – and I’d best not do that. As things stand, the figures reported here don’t compare like with like.
Still – full marks to Paul Donovan for tracking down and publishing those numbers which do help to give an indication of where work is going well, and work needs to be done in the digital realm.
BBC Radio Five Live’s figures are particularly interesting with 34% of their listening being digital. Five Live has taken a long view on this – as explained recently at Radio at the Edge – and you’ll barely hear on air that they’re available on AM. Instead it’s all about the digital listening mechanisms.
On the other hand, Radio 1 seems to have a way to go to persuade their audience to listen digitally.
For more on DAB – Matt Deegan has an interesting perspective from the point of view of 100% digital station (and multiplex) owner.
[Disclaimer: As well as being employed by Absolute Radio, who’s views might not necessarily be the same as my own (although they’re not that different in reality), I also sit on the RAJAR Technical Management Group representing commercial radio, which is in part responsible for drawing up the RAJAR publication code.]