RAJAR

RAJAR Q1 2017

RAJAR

Once again, 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.

It’s RAJAR time again, when the UK radio industry releases a new set of listening figures. And this is the first release of 2017, featuring a smattering of new stations.

In overall terms, there are a few declines this time around. Overall radio is down 2.4% in terms of listening compared with the previous quarter, although it is up 1.7% on the same time last year. Reach too is down slightly on the quarter but up on the year.

In particular, BBC radio seems to have taken a bit of a hit this quarter, being down 2.9% in reach and 3.6% in hours; whereas commercial radio is only down 1.2% in reach and down 0.8% in hours.

In reach terms, the BBC and commercial radio remain very evenly with matched with commercial radio just edging the BBC with 64% reach compared to the BBC’s 63%. While in share terms, the BBC has 53% of radio listening compared with commercial radio’s 45% (the other two percent or so is non-RAJAR measured radio services).

Overall 89% of the population continue to listen to the radio at least once a week – a figure that has remained constant for many years now.

Digital share is something everyone in the industry pays attention to, and it’s now up to 47.2% of all listening being digital – that’s a big jump in the post Christmas RAJAR period. And it’s really closing in the symbolic 50% digital level.

National and Digital Services

It hasn’t been the best quarter for Radio 1, with reach down 4.8% on last quarter and down 8.1% on last year. It now reaches 9.1m people a week. Five years ago it was reaching 11.1m a week. Obviously its target audience is the most challenging of the BBC’s radio services to target, as I’ve said on many occassions before. While listening was again down on the quarter, it was actually up fractionally on the year. Again, Radio 1 will look to its iPlayer and YouTube footprint.

Radio 2 is also down a little both on the previous quarter and the previous year in terms of reach. But it’s nothing to write home about, and the station remains vastly larger than any other in the country (and many other stations in the world – although I would point to the BBC World Service English service reaching 66m a year…). Hours are very strong though, and although it they’re down slightly on this time last year, those were record numbers then. Radio 2 is still a beast of a station.

Radio 3 had what can only be described as a disappointing quarter, down 11% in reach on both last quarter and last year. Hours were particularly poor, down nearly 20% on last quarter and 15% down on the year. It’s not clear to me what’s happened, but the current listening levels are within the bounds of what it has done previously over the last few years.

While Radio 4 has fallen away from it’s Brexit high a couple of quarters ago, it’s still 5% up on the year in reach and nearly 6% up on the year in hours. This is a good set of numbers, and the station has had a reach of over 11m for four quarters in a row now, when historically 10m was more its norm. Sister station Radio 4 Extra has also had decent numbers.

Five Live has had a disappointing set of numbers too – perhaps not able to capitalise on such a fairy tale Premier League season. It’s down 6.5% in reach on last quarter and down 7.5% on the year. While hours aren’t as bad, it’s interesting that in these highly politicised times, Radio 4 continues to do well, but 5 Live doesn’t.

6 Music, needless to say, confounds all of this. It’s up in everything meaning that it has also once again set record reach and hours figures. It has 2.351m listeners spending 23.4m hours a week with it.

As with Five Live, Talksport hasn’t done so well this quarter, being down 9% on the quarter and 12% on the year in terms of reach. Hours are much better with even a slight uptick on the quarter. Although with less than 3m reach and 20m hours, they will want to do better. Sister station Talksport 2 showed a slight dip on this quarter still hovering around the 250,000-300,000 range for its reach. Hours are a bit more concerning being 10% down on the quarter.

Talkradio got a bump in hours, but is down a little in reach to 238,000. While I’m convinced that there’s room for more speech radio, perhaps it needs further tweaking. Meanwhile Virgin Radio was up in reach and up in hours. While it has yet to return to the levels of the first set of numbers it posted, this at least is encouraging.

Classic FM ticks on by, flat in reach on the quarter, but up nearly 5% on the year. Hours are down slightly on the quarter but up nearly 7% on the year. It comfortably stays north of 5m listeners and has around 35m listening hours putting it in a good place.

Absolute Radio is up slightly on the quarter, and essentially flat on the year in terms of reach. Hours is much better story, with something of a bounce back from last quarter, being up 12%. Across the entire Absolute Radio Network, reach is down a little, but hours are up, and the brand has 4.2m reach and 33m hours (similar to the size of Classic, but with a much more valuable target audience for advertisers).

Radio X is making solid progress nationally up 5% on the quarter in reach and up 6% on the year. Hours are also up, and with a fair wind, it should break 10m listening hours within the next quarter or two. It certainly seems to have some traction.

LBC nationally is performing outstandingly well. it has just short of 1.8m listeners (up 6% on the quarter and up 16% on the year), while hours are closing in to 20m. Listening is up a whopping 27% on the year! This is one station aside from Radio 4 that really is prospering right now.

Capital is doing decently across its whole brand. While reach and hours are down a little on the quarter, they’re up on the year, and the brand still has 8.3m listeners spending 47m hours across the various Capital stations.

The Heart Network and Brand’s listeners (the latter includes Heart Extra) have drifted away a little in recent quarters and this is no exception. Nothing stunning, but still downwards. It’ll be interesting to see if a recent new TV ad does much to turn its fortunes around.

The Magic Network got bolstered this month (see below), but it was still down a little in reach. Hours are better, with now more than 20m Magic hours across the network. Magic too has recently invested in a TV ad, the results of which won’t hit until next quarter.

The Kiss Network has fallen back a little for the second quarter in a row, with a reach still just ahead of 5m, while hours have fallen back below 30m. The brand has done really well to maintain its audience when you compare it with the difficulties Radio 1 has had.

The Smooth Brand is not one I think about a lot, but it’s a real performer for Global with 5.4m reach and nearly 40m hours. It dipped a little this quarter but is a very solid performer if it can hang on to that listening.

Finally a couple of new stations. Union Jack, which has been on the air for several months now, has posted a reach of 71,000 with 265,000 hours. It’s a low cost station (broadcasting at easily the lowest bitrate of any DAB music services), but it probably needs a larger audience in due course.

Meanwhile Magic Soul, which began as a summer pop-up, has a reach of 242,000 and hours of not inconsequential 1.3m. A decent enough start for the service from Bauer.

Finally there’s Share Radio. It has just announced that will be coming off DAB soon, continuing as an online-only service. It posted its first set of numbers, with 17,000 reach and 40,000 hours. The difficulty the station has is that it’s demographic target market is far too specialist for RAJAR to accurately capture. It’s analogous to Bloomberg TV which previously came off BARB in the UK because although the service is definitely on in the right offices and on the right trading floors, it’s not something that the BARB panel can easily pick up.

Breakfast

I’ll leave others to spend more time on breakfast, but Nick Grimshaw saw his show fall as the overall station did. He’s down 4.2% in reach on the quarter and 5.4% down on the year. Unfortunately for him, that’s the lowest Radio 1 breakfast show figure since the current RAJAR methodology started back in 1999.

Over on Radio 2, Chris Evans put on nearly 2% to his audience this quarter – that’s nearly 9.4m listeners. Down a little on this time last year, but still a very successful show.

In commercial terms, Bauer has the top two shows in the Kiss breakfast show with Rickie, Melvin and Charlie with 2.1m listeners, while Christian O’Connell across the Absolute Radio Network is just behind with 1.9m listeners.

London

Who’s number one in London? Well of course it’s actually Radio 4. But you probably want to know how the commercial rivals stack up.

Capital can still shout loudly about that position. With 2.2m listeners, it’s jumped a frankly unlikely 30% on the quarter bouncing back from last quarter’s low. Looking back, that really does look like a freak quarter. Kiss is the next closest in reach with 1.8m listeners.

However in hours terms, LBC gets the crown with 11.5m hours (up 28% on the year!). This compares with 10.8m for Capital and 9.2m for Heart.

(Sorry, I’ve just realised I managed this report without a single chart. I promise to do better in future!)

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
Mediatel’s Newsline will have lots of figures and analysis
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 2 April 2017, 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.

RAJAR Q4 2016

RAJAR

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.

RAJAR MIDAS – Winter 2016

It has been a while since I’ve properly looked at RAJAR’s MIDAS survey, and it really does bear some close attention because it gives the most accurate picture of audio consumption in the UK right now.

As a reminder, MIDAS is a separate survey to the main RAJAR measurement, in which over 2,000 respondents are asked in detail about their audio listening habits by platforms, location, device and who they’re with.

It’s there to provide additional listening information and generally add ‘colour’ to the main RAJAR survey. Over time it allows some tracking in behavioural changes.

The full dataset is only made available to RAJAR subscribers, but RAJAR publishes a very good summary, and this provides plenty to get stuck into.

The key measure is Audio Share – the percentage of time spent listening to various types of audio. This is also known as “Share of Ear”, although I believe this is trademarked by Edison Research who carry out similar research in this area in the US.

Of course, simply saying “audio” is too simplistic because, for example, watching YouTube music videos is undoubtably a competitor to traditional audio sources for some audiences. So MIDAS does measure video as well as audio, although in most of the charts below, visual media has been excluded.

Share of Audio % (excluding visual)

The topline results show that live radio accounts for 76% of all audio consumption. The next closest category is digital music (downloads) at 9%. To put this in context, here is how radio’s share has performed over the most recent MIDAS surveys:

Careful examination of this data would seem to suggest a few things:

  • Radio remains vastly important in the audio world. While the last couple of MIDAS releases showed it declining a touch, it seems to have bounced back this time around. I’d be surprised if it didn’t fall some more over time since there are such strong radio competitors. But there’s still only one gorilla in this room.
  • Online Music Streaming (OMS in the above chart – e.g. Spotify, Apple Music) is growing. They seem to be growing as digital music tracks and CD listening is declining. Do you pay 99p at iTunes for a track or £9.99 a month for as much as you like? Consumers are shifting towards the latter.
  • Listen again is growing a bit, while podcasts remain static. The latter in particular definitely suggests something different in the UK, from say, the US.
  • Vinyl and cassette is basically static (although the graph doesn’t really show that it was at less than 1% at the start of the period displayed). You can safely treat all those news stories about vinyl’s resurgence as the hyperbole they truly are. Yes, a few albums are being sold as nice to have items, but in the scheme of things, they don’t amount to much in behavioural changes.

Now this chart doesn’t show the whole story. As I say, only RAJAR subscribers get the full dataset of MIDAS, but RAJAR publishes different aspects of the data in each release. And this time around they’ve published the demographic breakdown of listening. Indeed I think some of this has been presented at the Salon de la Radio in Paris over the last couple of days.

This shows some really clear differences by age group.

  • 15-24s spend 51% of their time listening to the radio (the green bar above) compared with 88% of 55+’s time. Radio is still the clear leader, but in time spent listening there is a competitor on the block.
  • Online Music Streaming is vastly more popular amongst 15-24s than other demographic groups. 15-24s spend 21% of their audio time on these services. This drops to just 9% for 25-34s and right down to 1% for 55+. This is as clear a behavioural change by age as you’re likely to see.
  • If you’d asked me to predict which age group spends the biggest proportion of their time listening to CDs, I have definitely said it was an older group. But in fact, the actual biggest group is 15-24s! Are they borrowing others music, or perhaps they can’t yet afford a Spotify subscription?
  • Podcasts are most popular amongst 24-34s, spending significantly more time than other age groups.

One thing to be careful of is that these are percentages within each age group. It’s important to note that overall volume of time spent listening will be different by different groups. So amongst CD listening, 5% off 55+ listening might be significantly more hours than 6% of 15-24s (the data doesn’t let us see).

What will be interesting to see is future growth of streaming. While there are free/bundeled streaming options – notably Spotify, or Amazon’s free offering for Prime members – there is surely a top limit to those prepared to pay £9.99 a month for music? There are ways to reduce the cost including family plans and logins shared with others; and some will happily bounce around different services taking advantage of free three month trials, creating new disposable email accounts as necessary. But continued growth within the UK market still isn’t clear.

Hours isn’t the whole story of course, and it’s worth looking at reach too. That shows that usage is much closer for most of the platforms. So while 90% of 55+ listen to the radio accounting for 88% of their listening, 82% of 15-24s listen to the radio but it accounts for just 51% of their listening.

Audio Reach % By Age Group

A couple of other charts. Ever wonder what people are doing when they listen to the radio?

Live Radio by Activity

Most radio presenters will recall being told to broadcast as though they were speaking to a single listener. There’s a good reason for that. A slight majority of radio listening is done alone, although this changes for younger listeners who listen more socially.

Live Radio by Who Listened With

Other things of note:

  • While most services are split evenly by sex, podcasts are notable for being significantly more male than female – 61% v 39%.
  • While laptops and tablets are used a lot for live radio, on smartphones the majority of use is for digital tracks and on demand audio.

There’s more in the original presentation which you can download on the RAJAR website.

Source RAJAR/IpsosMori. Sample 2,191. Conducted November 2016.

RAJAR Q3 2016

RAJAR

Once again, 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 continue to be delighted to be able to bring you this analysis in association with them. For more details on RALF, contact Deryck Pritchard via this link or phone 07545 425677.

All views here are clearly my own!

Just when you weren’t expecting it, along comes another RAJAR.

Overall, among all radio listeners, the quarter that includes much of the summer has seen a slight decrease, which is a regular seasonal thing. Reach has fallen 1.1% from last quarter’s record level but is still up 0.7% on last year. Hours are fairly stable too, down 0.7% on the quarter but up 0.4% on the year. Some – but notably not all – of the Brexit highs from last quarter have righted themselves, and we’ve got a second set of numbers from a whole host of new services.

National and Digital Services

Last quarter we saw a swathe of new services arrive on RAJAR, and indeed this quarter sees a first result for Heart Extra – a creditable 664,000 with nearly 3m listening hours.

But let’s have a look at the other newbies and see how they’re settling in after the flurry of activity around launch. TalkRadio has probably done the best, seeing some very solid numbers with a 36% increase in reach to 304,000 and a 63% increase in hours to close to 1.4m hours. Notably, the average number of hours spent listening to TalkRadio is up to 4.5 – not quite enough for it to be many people’s first choice station, but a solid secondary choice. I would expect this audience to continue to grow. I’m not sure to what extent News UK is promoting its services in its sister papers, but The Sun seems like a solid stablemate for the station.

TalkSport 2 hasn’t done so well, and is down 12.3% in reach (-3.0% in hours). While the football season began during this RAJAR period, it takes a little time to get up and running. So another quarter is needed to get a sense of where the station is at. Notably its older sibling had a poor performance this quarter, which only partly reflects that this period was post Euros. The station was down 13% in reach on the quarter, but 9% on the year. Hours were much more solid, down 1.3% on the quarter but up 2.7% on the year. The station has seen a couple of schedule changes recently with Colin Murray replaced by Jim White – although the latter hasn’t yet really been reflected in these figures. Virgin Radio is also probably a little disappointing, down 15.6% on the quarter in reach and 13.8% in hours.

Finally, Radio X saw a 6.4% increase in reach and a 14.4% increase in hours. I think the best you could probably say about that is solid, but the marketing and talent costs for the station surely need to warrant a larger audience than the current 1.265m reach that the station has.

Elsewhere, there will be some slightly tempered relief at Radio 1 where reach has increased 4.4% on the quarter (down 6.5% on the year), and up 5.0% in hours (down 7.4% on the year). It’s still just shy of the 10m mark though, which the station will be looking to return to.

Few will be too tearful that Radio 2 has lost a few more listeners down 1.0% in reach on the quarter and 3.5% down in hours. It’s still by far the biggest station in the UK, some 4m clear of the next biggest station Radio 4.

Radio 4 itself is down a little this quarter to 11.2m, but is up on last year at the same time. Coming in a period after the Brexit vote, that’s perhaps not surprising. Although it remains a busy time for politics, the same pattern seems to have been reflected in post Brexit newspaper ABC figures.

Radio 3 has had a bit of a fall this quarter, surprising in a Proms quarter. You may recall that they achieved some recent record figures in the last quarter, but now it’s below 2m again in reach.

Over at Five Live, they will probably be disappointed with a 6% decline in reach and 12% fall in hours during a quarter that included the Olympics. It should however be noted that year on year performance is relatively flat.

Classic FM has had a poor quarter too in reach terms, down 4.2% on the previous quarter and down 3.8% on the year. Hours are much more stable however.

Absolute Radio has had a strong quarter, up 21% in reach on the quarter and 24% on the year. In hours terms, it’s also a positive story with hours up 22% on the quarter and 17% on the year. Similarly, the Absolute Radio Network is net positive, with up in reach and hours on the quarter. But that slightly disguises the fact that Absolute 80s has fallen again. It’s reach is down to 1.458m (down 7.8% on the quarter and down 7.2% on the year), with hours down 1.4% on the quarter and 7.6% on the year. There has been a clear decline since the station moved from the Digital One to Sound Digital multiplex earlier this year. As a result, Kisstory (which is also carried on a range of local DAB multiplexes as well as Sound Digital) is now the largest commercial digital only service.

Kisstory has had some great results this quarter, up 4.6% in reach (23.3% on the year), and an essentially unbelievable 58.7% in hours (76% on the year). I’ve no idea quite what’s happened here, but I’d probably wait until next quarter before making too many pronouncements. Either way, these are both record results for the station. Kiss, on the other hand, has had a poor national result, down 10% in reach on the quarter (down 7.1% on the year), and down 6.7% in hours (down 8.4%) on the year.

[Updated] And 6 Music had yet another record quarter, up 3.4% to 2.342m. Hours were broadly flat, but well up on the year.

Magic has a mixed result with a slight increase in reach on the quarter (up 2.7%), but a fairly dramatic fall in listening hours (down 15%).

The Capital Network did well this quarter, growing its audience by 2.6% on the quarter and 8.1% on the year. It also saw growth in listening hours.

The Heart Network did OK too, up 1.6% in reach and 3.6% in hours. It was down on the year however.

Finally, LBC actually bucked the post-Brexit trend nationally, seeing its reach increase 4.2% and hours up 4.6%. Year on year these figures are remarkable – up 21.6% in reach and 32.7% in hours.

Along with Absolute Radio, I’d say that LBC had the standout set of results this quarter.

Breakfast

I won’t dwell on breakfast too much this time around except to note that Chris Evans saw his reach fall 4.4% this quarter (down 3.9% on the year) to 9.058m.

Over on Radio 1, it’s another disappointing set of results for Nick Grimshaw – his worst to date. He now has 5.249m listeners, down 3.4% on the quarter and down 9.1% on the year.

Meanwhile across the Absolute Radio Network, Christian O’Connell has just superseded his previous best ever results with a new record set of listeners – 1,949,000. That’s up 1.4% on the quarter and a massive 14.6% on the year. His is the largest commercial breakfast show in the country.

London

Last quarter there was something of a surge in London with a massive growth in listening. This quarter, that seems to have righted itself to a degree. All Radio listening was down 2.8% in reach but down 6.1% in hours in the capital. However, year on year, the reach is up 3.1% and down just 1.6%. So I would think of this as a correction.

The figures are similar for both BBC Radio and Commercial Radio, with the latter losing a little more reach. But in London, Commercial Radio continues to lead the BBC with 51.2% of listening compared with the BBC’s 42.5%.

One consequence of all of this is that Capital becomes the biggest commercial station in London in both reach, despite seeing an 11.2% fall in reach and a 12.2% fall in hours.

Kiss has had a poor result all around and that means that they lose they’re just pipped by Heart (9,179,000 v 9,177,000 hours!) who lost a relatively modest 2.4% in reach.

The biggest commercial station for hours is LBC, despite actually seeing a massive dip in both reach and hours on last quarter – down 23.3% in reach and down 27.6% in hours. I’d firmly put that as a consequence of Brexit however since year on year, they’re up on both measures.

Magic is also notable since it has bucked the London trend and grown 10.5% in reach (5.4% in hours). Hours are down on the quarter, but up on the year.

Radio X really is suffering in London. It’s at just 378,000 in reach, down 14.5% in reach (and 25.4% down year on year). Hours are steady.

Finally BBC London has had a poor result on the back of last quarter’s decent one, back down 17% in reach and 40% in hours.

Digital Listening

Digital listening has grown again, from 45.3% of all listening, to 45.5%. The chart below shows the extent to which this is driven by different platforms, with notably DAB accounting for nearly one in three hours of radio listened to.

More interesting perhaps is that among 15-24s, digital listening has now reached 50%! (It’s also reached 50.1% among 35-44s for the record).

While overall radio listening continues to fall among this age group, that listening that they’re now doing is much more likely to be digital, with internet streaming quickly approaching DAB as the preferred digital platform.

The following series of charts is perhaps useful.

While the digital/analogue chart above got close in 2013, this is a clear trend.

15-24s

It’s easy to become obsessed by youth listening, but as well as the behaviourals of how younger people listen (I hesitate to say “millennials” since that’s ill-defined, and a constantly moving goal), the volume of listening is important to consider.

This chart shows that while the overall proportion of radio listeners who are 15-24s has declined over time, the proportion of hours they account for has fallen even faster. So in Q2 2007, 15-24s accounted for 15.9% of all radio listeners and 13.3% of the time spent listening, in the most recent quarter this has fallen to 13.7% of all radio listeners and just 9.4% of listening hours. This is an increasingly hard audience to reach.

Here’s another worrying chart. It shows the proportion of 15-24s with no radios at all. Sure, they can stream or listen via digital television, but streaming sessions still seem to be much shorter – your phone or laptop can do so much more to entertain you after all.

While these aren’t stratospheric numbers, the rate of “no radio” ownership growth is large, and considering how trivial it is to own a single radio (e.g. your alarm clock), this is still a concerning trend. Even the much vaunted LG phone with DAB has done little to change things, and pretty much none of the flagship phones of 2016 have included any kind of working broadcast radio chip.

Station Repertoire

Radio listeners are remarkably loyal. In a world of an ever growing multiplicity of radio stations, the average radio listener listens to just 3.0 services. But this number varies by station, so the chart below has a select list of services and the number of stations listeners to each of those services listens to.

In other words, Radio 2 listeners are basically average, listening to on average 3.2 services (including Radio 2). At the other extreme, Virgin Radio listeners have a repertoire of 6.2 services.

As is perhaps understandable, it’s digital stations, who often act as “secondary” services who have the largest repertoires. In the industry vernacular, the station you listen most to is your first preference or “P1”, followed by your P2 and then P3 choices. Radio directors always want their listeners to be P1s.

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 September 2016, Adults 15+.

[Updated to include 6 Music which I somehow overlooked!]

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.

RAJAR Q2 2016

RAJAR

Once again, 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 continue to be delighted to be able to bring you this analysis in association with them. For more details on RALF, contact Deryck Pritchard via this link or phone 07545 425677.

All views here are clearly my own!

Early August means the results of RAJAR Q2 2016, and most of the new second national DAB multiplex (D2) services are reporting for the first time.

The first thing to note is that overall listening is at its highest ever for radio. 48.687m people listening to the radio each week. While listening hours aren’t at a similarly high record level, the average radio listener listens for a solid 21.5 hours a week.

You can perhaps partially attribute this record to that launch of those new commercial services, which in the main have a cumulative effect on radio listening. And commercial reach has overtaken the BBC’s again, with 35.570m people listen to commercial radio each week – another all time high.

(It’s fair to add at this point that RAJAR updates its estimate of the UK population in Q2 each year, so if radio listening remains constant, then you would expect numbers to increase proportionately with the population regardless. But we do know that there are some real challenges at the younger end of the age spectrum for radio, so this remains a good result.)

New Services and National

This quarter saw the launch of no fewer than six completely new services on D2, as well as the movement across from D1 or up from local multiplexes, of a number of other services.

But I must confess that I’m interested in a couple of specific stations in particular. First off, Virgin Radio reports for the first time. It has delivered a reach of 409,000 with 1,453,000 listening hours – a result that seemed to be good enough to send everyone off to the pub on Wednesday afternoon!

Now the key thing here is any possible misattribution.

Recall that I previously looked after ratings for Virgin Radio as it changed to Absolute Radio back in September 2008. We were acutely aware that no matter how big our marketing budget (and it was never going to big enough), many listeners would continue to think of the station as Virgin Radio. If they were long term listeners, they might have been listening for 15 years at that point. And the station adopted a more adult approach of rebranding, slowly morphing from Virgin to Absolute, rather than the more usual ‘off air on Friday, back on air with new format on Monday’ approach that more regularly happens. The majority of the presenters remained the same, and the music was only very slightly tweaked – probably not enough that the average listener would notice. So the big job was to expunge the old name and get people calling the station by its new one.

As far as RAJAR went, we had a label in diaries that said something like “Absolute Radio (was Virgin Radio)” which is pretty typical, and helps respondents navigate the name change. Capital Liverpool still refers to Juice on its label, for example.

Of course the station initially took a massive hit in listening figures, and that label referencing Virgin Radio remained in RAJAR diaries for many subsequent quarters – indeed years. It takes a long time for people to forget a station’s name.

And now we get the new Virgin Radio, with the same logo, but nearly all new presenters. The music mix isn’t the same as Absolute Radio, although the new Virgin shares just under a third of its playlist (at time of writing) with Absolute.

So take that into account when you’re considering its figures. Looking at its figures in comparison with the other new launches from the Wireless Group (or should that be News Corp now?), this feels a little high for the first set of numbers. But then Absolute Radio has gone up this quarter too very slightly (see below), so maybe all is fine. One to watch…

What about the other new launches? TalkSport 2 saw a reach of 285,000 and 913,000 hours. As expected, they’ve picked up Absolute Radio’s second pick of Saturday afternoon Premier League football commentaries, so this may take time to grow as they build out their portfolio of sports.

TalkRadio is at 224,000 reach and 840,000 hours. That’s going to need to grow since speech radio isn’t cheap. I suspect that the success of this will be down to marketing. Fortunately for all of their stations, having a new owner who owns a series of national newspapers (and has interests via a parent company in a satellite TV network), marketing might prove to be a bit more achievable in the medium term.

In any case, these are decent results, and all have plenty of room to grow.

Mellow Magic achieved a respectable 380,000 audience, with nearly 1.6m listening hours, while Magic Chilled (which is DAB+ recall, so not available on all DAB radios even within the D2 transmission area) reached 233,000 listeners for 601,000 hours. I suspect Bauer will be perfectly happy with both as something to build on, and something to add into a Magic Network national sales proposition.

As an aside, Magic has also been running a series of pop-up DAB stations. We’ve had Magic Abba, and right now there’s Magic Soul Summer. Sadly, these don’t get measured by RAJAR as they’re on-air too briefly.

The final completely new service on D2 is Awesome Radio, but I don’t believe that it is currently being measured by RAJAR.

Elsewhere, there’s no doubt that Radio 1 has had another shocker, down 4.6% on the quarter and 9.4% on the year in reach terms. 9,455,000 is its lowest reach since 2003, and there are no immediate signs of improvement. Listening is actually up a little on the quarter, but also down on the year. As I’ve repeatedly mentioned previously, I believe this to be a larger problem than Radio 1 and more “radio” – although arguably Kiss is bucking the trend (see below).

Radio 2 is down a little, but nothing to be concerned about, with 15.3m listeners and “only” 179,000,000 hours, or 17% of all radio listening!

Radio 3 has had its best reach figures since 2011 at 2.2m, all the more surprising for not happening in a Proms period (they’ve just started). Hours are down a bit though. Meanwhile over at Classic FM, they’ve bounced back from last quarter’s very poor results, up 7.6% in reach to 5.5m. Cue lots of headlines about a classical music resurgence, which I don’t believe is true.

Radio 4 has had its best ever reach under the current methodology (i.e. since at least 1999), with just over 11.5m listeners. Can we put this squarely down to coverage of Brexit? Perhaps we can. Hours are also up, if not quite at record-breaking levels.

5Live also saw gains in the period – albeit, more modest – up 1.5% in reach to 5.858m reach.

Absolute Radio was fractionally up with a reach of 2.185m listeners this quarter, although listening was down. It’ll be worth watching closely with regard to any issues over misattribution as I mentioned above.

Talksport also had a good quarter, jumping 6.5% in reach and 15.4% in hours on the previous quarter. Perhaps it was helped by the a decent end of the season story and notably Leicester City? (Although arguably that should have also affected 5Live.)

Digital

Last quarter, you may recall, RAJAR reallocated listening to platforms for those who failed to record it properly. This led to something of a “bump” for digital listening. It rose to 44.1%.

So this quarter, it was going to be interesting to see if that one-time increase would slow growth. Q1 was also the quarter that new Christmas DAB sets tended to inflate numbers a little.

Well it turns out that it hasn’t dampened growth, and we’ve seen listening increase again to 45.3% of all listening hours now being on a digital platform. What’s more, of those who listen to the radio, 78.6% now choose to listen for at least some of their listening time via a digital platform.

Needless to say, these are both all-time highs.

Breaking that 45.3% down, 32.2% of listening is via a DAB radio (a record), while 8.0% is via the internet (also a record). Only DTV is fairly settled at 5.1%.

Streaming grows as broadband improves, smartphones become more normal, and data plans increase. In another year or so, we might be at one in ten hours of radio being streamed in the UK.

I was disappointed, but not at all surprised to see that Absolute 80s has registered a fall this quarter. Recall that this was the largest commercial digital only station. Last quarter Bauer moved it from the D1 to D2 multiplex. Unfortunately, there is significantly less coverage for D2, and stations like Absolute that moved across, saw decreases in availability. Maybe it was due a dip anyway, but it exhibited an 8.1% fall in reach and 9.9% fall in hours on the previous quarter.

Not everyone can switch to streamed listening or the digital television when they lose their DAB signal.

6 Music has another record reach, up fractionally on last quarter’s record reach to nearly 2.3m listeners listening for nearly 22m hours.

Radio 4 Extra seems to have rebounded a little from last quarter’s disappointing results, back to nearly 2m listeners.

Asian Network achieved an all-time record reach of 676,000 which will please them.

The BBC World Service was basically flat in reach (-0.8% on the quarter) at 1.454m, but down 5.5% in hours.

Finally, LBC is worth examining. Reach and hours across the network are at record highs under the current methodology. It’s reach is now 1.729m, up a massive 12.3% this quarter, and 16.7% on the year, while hours are even better with 17.5m up 15% on the quarter and 20% on the year. I think we can squarely put that gain down to Brexit, and indeed the question is whether they can hang onto that listening in future quarters. A really excellent performance.

Networks

The Kiss Network is an interesting one to keep an eye on. It seems to be continuing to grow, building out Kisstory and Kiss Fresh. And what’s interesting is that all the Kiss brands are young, with Kiss aged averaging 30, Kisstory 32, and Kiss Fresh 27. Radio 1 on the other hand averages 35. The Kiss Network has achieved a record 5.5m reach, up 5.4% on last quarter. And Kisstory is now only just behind Absolute 80s in the battle for best performing commercial digital station. Kiss and Kisstory also achieved record results in London.

The Capital Network is also growing, although we need to be careful because they’ve grown their portfolio of stations too. This quarter, the network is up 3.9% in hours to nearly 7.9m listeners, while hours have also grown very solidly by 7.4%.

The Heart Network isn’t doing quite as well, falling slightly this quarter in reach and hours. Nothing disastrous, but it doesn’t feel that Heart Extra has had any effect so far. But there is a curiosity here. Heart Extra is a service I can listen to on DAB, but it doesn’t arrive on RAJAR until Q3 since it launched mid-period [Updated].

The Absolute Network suffered a small drop down 1.6% in reach and 1.3% in hours. Nothing major – but it would seem to be driven by Absolute 80s.

Finally we have the brand new Magic Network placing a strong benchmark figure of 3.7m listeners. We’ll see how it does from here on in.

Breakfast

Grimmy on Radio 1 has held his show flat this quarter, which is actually a pretty decent result when compared with the station’s overall performance. He is down 7% on the previous year however. But a solid result in the circumstances.

Over on Radio 2, Chris Evans has perhaps been temporarily distracted by Top Gear – the press certainly has (has a TV show ever had its production pored over by the press in such detail?). His radio show is down a modest 2.6% to 9.472m, but down a little less on the year. Nothing to worry about here as he now concentrates on his breakfast show.

Christian O’Connell had a great set of results last quarter, so it is perhaps not surprising that he’s slipped back this time a little. But he fell just 0.1% or by 2,000 listeners. I’m sure both Bauer and Christian will be very happy with 1.923m listeners! Listening is up too.

People are always interested in how Chris Moyles is doing. As already mentioned, Moyles featured in another heavy TV campaign during at least part of this period. He’s actually down in audience a little this quarter to 694,000 nationally. This could be a slow build for Global.

London

Before talking about any particular London station, it’s always worth carefully looking at the market overall because we have seen some odd shifts around. Arguably, this quarter is no exception, with All Radio listening up 4.5% in reach and 9.7% in hours. Year on year changes are more steady, but this is worrying as it seems unlikely that overall behavioural listening patterns are changing quite so much. As ever with RAJAR, look for long term trends rather than short term blips.

Capital has lost a few listeners this quarter, down 0.9% to 2.266m (although up on the year), however it maintains its position and number one in London in reach terms.

In hours terms, Kiss can claim to be the “most listened to” commercial music station with a 17% bump in hours on the quarter, essentially righting a massive fall in hours last quarter. It’s reach is just behind Capital’s with 2.127m. So it looks like for the foreseeable future, Capital and Kiss will be slugging it out for commercial music dominance.

Heart has bounced bank from last quarter’s awful numbers, climbing 11.4% in reach to 1.724m, although it did see a fall in hours by 9.0%.

Magic on the other hand, fell back from last quarter by 6.5% to 1.632m listeners, while its hours improved 4.7%. Perhaps it was seeing some its listeners trial some sister services? (See more on this below).

LBC had a massive bump this quarter surpassing its national performance, jumping 29% in reach in London to 1.292m, and a frankly astonishing 61.5% in hours to 14.5m hours, making it the biggest commercially listened to station in London. The jump is so large as to almost be unbelievable. However, as mentioned above, there was Brexit during this quarter, and I think it’s fair to say that this was discussed more than once on LBC…

Radio X had a modest jump this quarter with a 31.2% increase in reach to 442,000, and a 27% increase in hours to 2.5m. The percentages are good, but the numbers are low.

And BBC Radio London had a massive jump from last quarter’s dismal numbers – up 44% in reach to 510,000 and 60% in hours to 3.7m. Again, could Brexit be part of this?

Sister Stations

Absolute Radio and the BBC paved the way – in essence copying something that TV had been doing prior to that. But we continue to see sub-brands or sister services popping up. We’ve had TalkSport 2, Mellow Magic and Magic Chilled just this quarter. And of course there are decades stations and Extra/Xtra stations a-plenty. But to what extent do these services share audiences with their brethren? (Yes – I’ve done this before.)

Since I’ve been chart-free so far this quarter, here’s an incomplete look at some of these services… charted! And since it’s hard to display overlaps beyond three services in just two dimensions, I’ve limited my analysis to the three biggest services within a group. Note that these are only very roughly to scale, and they default to the period over which both or all three stations would be reported.

Radio 1/1Xtra

Slide1

Radio 4/Radio 4 Extra

Slide2

Absolute Radio/Absolute 80s/Absolute Radio 90s

Slide4

Capital/Capital Xtra – London

Slide3

Magic/Mellow Magic/Magic Chilled

Slide5

TalkSport/TalkRadio/Virgin Radio (by special request)

UTV

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 26 June 2016, Adults 15+.

UPDATED to correct Virgin Radio’s reach.

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.

RAJAR Q1 2016

RAJAR

Once again, 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 continue to be delighted to be able to bring you this analysis in association with them. For more details on RALF, contact Deryck Pritchard via this link or phone 07545 425677.

All views here are clearly my own!

It’s not the biggest station in the world, or indeed in London, but everyone is going to be curious how it did. In Tuesday night’s Arqiva Commercial Radio Awards, Radio X won the marketing award for its launch campaign. I don’t know how much Global spent on the campaign, but it must have been a healthy seven digits, and if it was aimed at someone like me – well their targeting worked, as I saw it repeatedly.

But how has that transferred into listeners?

Last time around, we only had London numbers which weren’t extraordinary to be honest. But now we have a national picture.

In overall terms, you might consider that Radio X is doing OK. It has a reach of 1.24m and 8.8m hours. They’re both records compared with the previous Xfm figures nationally, although that should be set against Radio X getting a D1 DAB slot, meaning that it was fully national. Xfm had to make do with a number of local DAB multiplexes.

In overall terms, then a positive results. But in London, the picture is pretty poor. A reach of 337,000 represents the lowest reach figure the station has had since Q2 1999 – obviously then under its previous guise of Xfm. I don’t think there’s any way of spinning this – it’s a very poor result. Hours are not quite so bad, down on recent quarters but up on the previous year. But that reach is worrying for Global.

In Manchester, the other place where Radio X has FM transmission, reach was 179,000 which is the lowest its been since Q1 2014. Again, hours are stronger.

So something of a mixed picture for the service.

Elsewhere, if you’re waiting for news of the new channels that have launched recently on D2, then you have another three months to discover how TalkRadio, the new Virgin Radio, TalkSport 2 and the rest are doing.

Overview

The overall All Radio picture remains decent, with listening remaining over 1 billion hours. But the commercial share of radio has slipped back from 44.0% to 43.1% – the BBC’s share increasing from 53.5% to 54.1% in the last quarter.

Average hours per listener remain at 21.0 overall, the same as last quarter, but still at an all-time low.

And yes, if we look at 15-24s, the youngest age group that RAJAR reliably measures, there are some worrying records. Only 84% of this group listen to the radio (although it has been as low as 83%), but they listen for 95m hours – a new low – and spend an average 14 hours a week listening to the radio – also a new low.

There are some challenges here.

Let’s go through network by network

Radio 1 is unlikely to be happy with a quarter that saw its reach drop below 10m again. Reach is down 4.1% on the quarter, although 2.1% up on last year, to 9.907m. But the real story is in hours, where it has a new record low of 56,780,000. That’s down 8.3% on last quarter and down 12.9% on last year. Radio 1 listeners now listen for an average of 5.7 hours a week when once it was closer to 10.

Radio 2 had an excellent quarter with reach creeping up to 15.5m, while hours leapt to a new all-time record of 187m. Put another way, that’s 18.6% of all radio listening (aka market share). Its listeners spend 12.1 hours a week with the service.

Radio 3 has seen some of its best figures in quite a while, up 3.2% on the quarter and 1.6% on the year, it’s hours have grown even more. It now reaches 2.117m, its best result since 2013.

Radio 4 had a so-so quarter, with reach down 3.3% on the quarter and down 2.9% on the year. Hours were similarly down, but the station is listened to for 11.5 hours a week. (For what it’s worth, The Archers were down a little this quarter to 4.7m across its various Radio 4 outings!)

Five Live possibly benefited from an incredible Premier League season as Leicester never faltered. Its reach was up 3.4% on the quarter to 5.774m while hours were also up.

Absolute Radio followed up Tuesday night’s Station of the Year award with a very good set of results – the best since it rebranded from Virgin Radio in 2008. Reach was up 2.2% on the quarter and 9.3% on the year, with hours seeing even better improvements up 14.5% on the quarter and 8.4% on the year.

Classic FM has had a very poor quarter, down more than 7% in reach on both the quarter and the year, with even worse performances in hours, it has achieved its lowest reach and hours since the new methodology began in 1999, with 5.1m reach and 32.5m hours. However it’s worth remembering that Classic FM remains two and a half times the size of Radio 3.

TalkSport also seemed to benefit from the Premier League title run-in, with a modest quarter on quarter increase of 0.9%, but a larger increase in listening, up 2.1%.

The BBC World Service saw a small dip this quarter, down 2.7% in reach, but up 8.4% on the year. Listening hours are well up however.

Digital

Digital Listening is worth examining this quarter because RAJAR has removed – or rather, modelled out – unspecified platform listening. There was always previously a small rump of listeners who either didn’t know what platform they were listening to, or who just failed to record it.

What that means is that there have been a few jumps this quarter. Digital listening rises to 44.1% – inching ever closer to the majority of listening – although since this is a post-Christmas quarter and DAB sets get given as gifts, you might expect that to happen anyway. However that modelling does also mean that AM/FM listening rises slightly too.

And if you look within that digital listening this does also mean that Internet listening has reached a high of 7.8% of all listening.

And 63.7% of all radio listeners spend at least some of their time listening via digital platforms.

(Update: Since Phil Riley asked me, here is the position with AM/FM listening. 55.9% of listening is now AM/FM. This is up from last quarter when it was 50.7%, partially because of the modelling of unspecified listeners I mentioned above. However a good number of people still listen to at least some of their output in analogue. 75.4% of the population (or 84.5% of radio listeners) spend at least a little time on AM/FM. I would suspect that the car is a major place for this.)

6 Music has set new records – I feel like I’ve typed those words before. It’s reach is up 1.5% on the quarter (and 8.3% on the year) to 2.236m, a new record high. Listening hours are also up to a record high of 20,954,000. 6 Music listeners hear the station for 9.4 hours a week now.

Absolute 80s has had another massive quarter with its biggest ever reach of 1.72m up 9% on the quarter and 19% on the year. Hours are down a fraction however, and of course it has now moved off D1 to D2 – which means fewer people can listen to the service. It could well fall next quarter which would be a real shame.

Radio 4 Extra has slipped back a little this quarter from some recent highs. It’s not clear what’s happened, but it’s down 12.4% on the quarter and 14.8% on the year. It’s similarly down in listening hours.

LBC is obviously on FM in London, but available nationally digitally, and it has just had its best ever results with a reach of 1.54m (up 7.0% on the quarter), and 15.241m hours (up 8.1% on the quarter). It’ll be interesting t see what, if any, effect TalkRadio has on LBC next time around, but they’re clearly flying right now.

1Xtra crept up over the 1m reach again, while Kisstory had another good quarter, up a little to 1.441m. Capital Xtra was also up to a new high of 1.202m.

Absolute Radio 90s had its best ever reach of 681,000, while Absolute Radio 70s was down very slightly to 285,000.

Jazz FM – back on national DAB from next quarter’s results – had a steady quarter, up slightly in reach to 506,000 but down in hours.

And it’s always entertaining to see that The Hits is still reported. It has 693,000 listeners down nearly 15% on the quarter. I know it essentially delivers the Bauer City 3 network, but it’s not actually on any platforms aside from Freeview and the internet!

Networks and Groups

BBC Radio is basically flat on the quarter overall, with fractional changes. The same is true comparing year on year, with no change in reach, and a modest 1.7% fall in hours.

Global Radio (based on the stations they own rather than those they sell or the brands they licence), is very slightly down on the quarter (1.1% down in reach, 2.3% down in hours), but decently up on the year.

Bauer Radio (including Orion which they recently purchased, but for whom they’d been selling nationally previously) are up in reach (0.8%) but down in hours (-0.3%). Again it’s a better result on the year.

Finally, Wireless Group (previously known as UTV Radio until the sold the “TV” part of the business to ITV) saw some falls, down a fraction in reach on the quarter but down 2.7% in hours. On the year, the falls are more significant, down 6.9% in reach and 13.1% in hours. Obviously they have a host of new national services that’ll be included in next quarter’s results.

Looking more broadly at some of the networks, the Magic network increased a little to 3.434m ahead of its new services being added into the mix next quarter. Meanwhile the Smooth Network came down a little after last quarter’s record levels.

The Capital Brand achieved its highest ever reach of 8.162m up a little on last quarter. Hours are down a touch however. And the Heart Network was down a little off its record high to 9.014m, again ahead of its spin-off brand being included next quarter.

The Kiss Network performed very strongly – just short of the record it set six months ago.

Finally, the Absolute Radio Network was down a fraction on the quarter (down 0.7%) but well up on the year (11.9%) in terms of reach.

London

The first thing to say about London is that radio listening is down in the capital – quite substantially. Reach has fallen 2.7% on the last quarter, while hours have dropped 5.0%. Year on year, listening is up, but we continue to see some odd shifts in London that frankly, I wouldn’t expect to see.

So Capital has done very indeed – up a massive 10% in reach and 11% in hours (and up mre than a quarter on both measures, year on year). It’s easily the biggest commercial station in London in terms of reach.

However Heart grabs the hours crown amongst commercial stations – despite seeing its reach fall 14%, it managed to increase its hours by 4.6% on the quarter. I’m afraid I can’t explain that. Lots of people stopped listening, but those who stayed more than made up for it in terms of hours? Average hours for the station jumped from 5.1 to 6.0 in one quarter.

Meanwhile Kiss saw its reach flat in London, but hours fell by 15%. Another very curious result.

LBC is another station that saw a slight fall in reach (down 3.8%), but a massive fall in hours (down 17.4%) on the quarter.

Magic experienced a more standard pattern, being down in reach and hours (9.2% and 15.2% respectively on the quarter).

Absolute Radio was another oddity – down 6.4% in reach, yet up 22% in hours. Year on year figures were more consistently down 18% and 12% respectively.

We’ve already mentioned Radio X, so let’s draw a veil over lines on a spreadsheet that show results down about a third in reach and hours on the quarter.

Smooth could probably be said to have done well being down a little in reach but flat in hours.

That couldn’t be said for BBC Radio London down a third in reach and nearly 20% in hours on the quarter.

Incidentally – the youngest commercial station in London? Capital Xtra. But they had a disappointing quarter in the capital too, quarter on quarter, down 3.7% in reach and down nearly 10% in hours.

And because I’m a little obssessed about younger listeners, here’s a chart showing average listening hours amongst that age group falling over time in London.

Breakfast

Breakfast is the bread and butter of radio. 86% of radio listeners listen at breakfast – that is Mon-Fri between 0600 and 0900. The peak radio listening moment tends to be about 8am on a weekday.

Listening hours at breakfast account for 23.4% of all radio listening – a big chunk all things considered.

So I was interested to have a look at some overall breakfast listening trends, since it’s such a critical part of the day.

As of Q1 2016, 76.4% of the adult population listen to breakfast radio. A pretty good result, although it’s down from about 80% from five years ago. And you can see from the chart below that this does seem to be a bit of a trend.

If you look at 15-24s it falls from just over 70% to 63.3% today.

My question then is this: are we still providing the right mix of things people want at breakfast?

Obviously the smartphone has come along and is able to give us news, sport, weather, traffic and social media. Many of those things were – and are – radio staples. So what’s radio’s unique proposition? What can it do to maintain audiences and stop them departing from breakfast radio?

As for some national shows themselves?

As with the station overall, it’s not been a great quarter for Grimmy, down 7.4% in reach on the quarter, although only down 1.1% on the year. He now has 5.4m listeners.

Chris Evans on Radio 2 has – if not quite a record audience – then a very good one. He’s listened to by 9.7m people each week, up 3.1% on the quarter and 2.8% on the year.

Across the Absolute Radio Network, Christian O’Connell has his best audience ever, just short of 2m listeners, and up 4.7% on the quarter and 21% on the year. He also won big on Tuesday at the Arqiva Awards.

On TalkSport, Alan Brazil has 1.239m listeners, down a little on the quarter (-4.3%) and more heavily on the year (-16.6%). Again this reflects the overall station performance.

And Chris Moyles has 784,000 listeners which is up 16% from the previous quarter, and nearly double what Xfm was doing the year before. You would imagine that getting over 1m listeners is within reach for him.

Average Ages

Finally, we often talk about “average age” and invariably we get a mean figure which hides a lot of light and dark. So I thought it might be interesting to look at the distribution of reach by age across a number of stations.

So while the average age of a Radio 1 listener is 35, the modal age (i.e. the biggest single age) is actually 24 which is where the peak on the chart below is. Average ages get skewed by, for example, a handful of 88 year olds who just won’t let go of Radio 1 (or are forced to listen to it by their grandchildren!).

Interestingly, Radio 2 has peaks in a couple of places – between 48 and 52, and 64-69. However this is probably more to do with population demographics than anything. The latter are baby boomers for example.

The other stations are slightly lost on this scale, so here’s a second version of the chart rescaled a bit.

Because these stations are bit smaller, the charts get messier (RAJAR isn’t really designed to be looked at this way), but you can see Absolute’s peak at 34, and TalkSport’s a bit older.

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 (on his redesigned blog
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 site.
Global Radio’s site.

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos-MORI/RSMB, period ending 3 April 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.

RAJAR Q4 2015

RAJAR

Once again, 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’m delighted to be able to bring you this analysis in association with it. For more details on RALF, contact Deryck Pritchard via this link or phone 07545 425677.

Radio X

The big excitement in the radio industry this time out was to see how Radio X has done, having been re-branded from Xfm and had a huge splurge of cash spent on both new presenters and a particularly substantial marketing campaign. When Global decides to get behind something they do really get behind it.

The new station has a reach of 1.225m, up 17% on the previous quarter, and up 30% on the previous year. Both very decent figures, but I suspect that Global is looking for more.

Hours have a better story with a 43% increase on the quarter and a 49% increase on the year.

But of course the station marks a return to national radio of Chris Moyles, with much of the marketing revolving around him, including the complained about TV ad. His first book shows a reach of 671,000 up 42% on the last quarter and 41% on the last year.

The average age of the Radio X listener is 34, on a par with the final Xfm age, but perhaps a little lower than in the past.

The key thing to note about Radio X is that it’s a 6 Month weighted station. And that means that only three months’ of Radio X has been included in these numbers. So you can confidently expect the station to grow when Q1 2016’s figures are released in three months’ time.

A decent first time out, but there is still plenty of room for Radio X to grow.

Overview

Radio reach in the UK remains solidly at 90% with just over 1 billion hours of listening. But the number of hours per listener has fallen to 21.0 for the first time – people aren’t listening to quite as much radio as in the past. There are a lot of audio choices available these days.

Between the BBC and commercial radio, things are fairly even, with 53.5% of listening to BBC services, with 44.1% of listening to commercial radio.

Interestingly, commercial reach has just overtaken BBC reach for the first time, with 66% of the population listening to a commercial service against the BBC’s 65%.

Digital

It was a fairly uneventful quarter in digital terms with no growth in overall digital listening. Last quarter there had been quite a decent bump, so this was perhaps not unexpected.

The chart above shows that most platforms were basically flat this quarter. Traditionally we tend to see a bit of growth in the quarter post-Christmas when new gadgets are used for the first time. So stay tuned for Q1 2016!

Networks and Groups

6 Music has broken another all-time record, now having a reach of 2.2m (up 0.6% on the quarter and 5.7% on the year). Hours actually slipped back 1.5% this quarter so no record there, but it’s obviously a strong performer across the board.

Radio 1 saw a small fall of 2.2% on the quarter and 1.0% on the year in terms of reach. The hours story is a little worse with a fall of 7.5% on the quarter and 7.3% on the year. This again shows that while younger audiences continue to listen to the radio, they’re not listening quite as much – a challenge for everyone in radio.

Radio 2 had a modest reach increase of 0.5% on the quarter and 1.2% on the year, although hours slipped back a little to “just” 179m. Radio 2, let’s not forget, accounts for 17.5% of all radio listening in the UK more than 1 in 6 hours listened to.

I notice that the controller of Classic FM having another dig at Radio 3 in the press recently. I’m never quite sure about why that is because Classic FM has an audience of 5.5m (up 0.6% on the quarter, down 0.9% on the year) – way ahead of Radio 3’s 2.05m reach (down 0.9% on the quarter, up 1.0%) on the year. 819,000 people listen to both stations. So while a full third of Radio 3’s audience listen to Classic FM, only 15% of Classic FM’s audience ever listen to Radio 3. That suggests that Classic FM is a far bigger threat to Radio 3 than vice versa.

Radio 4 had a good quarter up in reach (1.4% on the quarter, 1.5% on the year) and hours (3.9% on the quarter, 4.6% on the year). And Five Live also had a good set of numbers with reach up on the quarter (1.4%) althouhg down a fraction on the year (-0.4%). Hours were stronger, now up to 11.5 hours a week – placing it as a station with one of the most loyal audiences.

Radio 4 Extra just fell behind 6 Music again in the BBC’s internal digital only battle, while Five Live Sports Extra fell back quite a lot with less compelling sport at the end of last year. Cricket in South Africa should bolster the station next quarter.

Talksport had a mixed quarter, with a reach that fell 2.9% on the quarter although up 1.9% on the year. It remains just over 3m. More concerningly, the station’s hours fell 11.8% on the quarter (down 9.4% on the year) to just over 18m. That means that the average duration for Talksport listeners is now just under 6 hours for the first time. The station will be looking to grow overall hours with the addition of Talksport 2 from next month (it launches at the Cheltenham Festival). It’ll also be interesting to hear what happens with Premier League radio rights in the coming months and whether UTV will be seeking to increase its investment to support this new service.

It’s been another excellent quarter for the Absolute Radio Network reaching a new record high of nearly 4.4m reach (up 4.9% on the quarter and 12.7% on the year), although hours fell a little on the quarter (down 2.9%) while still being well up on the year (12.9%).

Absolute Radio itself remains very strong, flat in reach on the quarter (0.1%) but well up on the year (24.6%) following the inclusion of the Midlands’ FM transmitter. Hours will be a little more concerning, down 10.5% on the quarter while still 24.7% up on the year.

Absolute 80s remains the biggest commercial digital only station – the closest competition being Bauer stable-mate Kisstory. The station is up 0.9% on the quarter and 11.7% on the year. Hours are even better up 7.2% on the quarter and 13.4% on the year.

The Kiss Network is flat in reach terms on the quarter, but up on the year. But the strong performer, as mentioned, is Kisstory which is up 7% on the quarter and 33% on the year in reach terms. With the upcoming changes to multiplexes for both Absolute 80s and Kisstory (see below), we could well see Kisstory overtake Absolute 80s in the future.

The Capital Network looks to have done OK, up a little in reach, and down a touch in hours, but it should be noted that the former Juice FM in Liverpool, which has just been rebranded as Capital, is included in this number.

The Heart Network is basically flat in reach terms, both on the quarter and on the year. With the upcoming sister service, it’ll be worth watching to see if the brand continues to grow.

LBC nationally had a slight fall on the quarter (down 2.8%) but is still 8% up on the year to 1.44m. There’s a similar story with hours where it’s down on the quarter but up on the year. That all said, many stations would kill for the 9.8 hours a week its average listener spends with the station (even if it was once much more than even that). It’ll be facing renewed competition from TalkRadio soon, and it’ll be interesting to see both how the two compare in the future – not just in terms of audience but also in tone.

Smooth as a network did OK, but I’m curious a little about Smooth Extra. This is only the second quarter that it has been reported and it actually fell from 930,000 to 904,000. Now for one month of that period, it was rebranded as Smooth Christmas and played only Christmas music (Clearly I didn’t listen to it). But that seems to have actually harmed rather than help its figures. But would a RAJAR diarist know that Smooth Extra and Smooth Christmas were the same service?

And finally there’s another new service this quarter – UCB 1 (formerly known as UCB) – the Christian service. Its first reach was a very creditable 236,000. Given that the service is effectively funded by its own listeners, this performance isn’t surprising. The operators obviously know that they have a substantial listenership. Whether this means that UCB 1 will be taking advertising soon is another question.

London

London is a bit of an oddity this time around, in that everyone seems to have done well. Well nearly everyone!

The issue really comes from the fact that last quarter, All Radio listening in London fell quite precipitously from 89% to 85%. This seems to have been a one-off, and listening in the capital has returned to 89% this quarter.

But that increased reach means that most of the big stations did fairly well in London.

Capital regains the commercial reach crown from Kiss, although the competition remains close at the top. Both services had very small falls in reach this quarter, -0.4% for Capital and -3.5% for Kiss. But LBC has the most commercial hours in London, in a hotly contested field with Kiss, Capital and Magic all with over 10m hours. LBC has had a quarter on quarter jump of 21% to leap ahead of the pack to 10.9m hours.

Capital has been hardest hit. While it was basically flat in reach, its hours fell 21% on the quarter (although remain flat on the year).

The rebranded BBC Radio London (formerly BBC London 94.9) saw an increase on the year (up 8.9%) although a fall on the quarter (-2.1%) as perhaps listeners learn and adapt to the new schedule.

Finally, this quarter saw a first result for The Wireless from Age UK. This is a service that has run on DAB in London for a number of years. It does report nationally since it’s available online, but a reach of 24,000 suggests that going onto RAJAR mightn’t have been advisable.

Breakfast

Nick Grimshaw saw a small increase of 0.4% on the quarter (a fall of 2.0% on the year) to 5.8m this time around.

Chris Evans saw a small dip on Radio 2 of 1.6% on the quarter and 2.0% on the year to 9.409m. While on Radio 4, the Today Programme is up 2% on the quarter and year to 6.9m.

On Absolute Radio, Christian has had a decent set of numbers. Down 2.5% on the quarter, he’s up 3.2% on the year to 1.84m at breakfast across the Absolute Radio Network.

In London, the Today Programme is the most listened to breakfast programme with nearly 2m listeners. But nobody is interested in that. They want to know about the commercial fight. Lisa Snowdon finished her final quarter on the Capital breakfast show with Dave Berry as the market leader. It was up 10.2% on the quarter and 14.8% on the year.

It’s more than 100,000 clear of the next nearest commercial service – Magic Breakfast with Nick Snaith. That show has bounced back from 771,000 last quarter to 935,000 this quarter – a 21.3% jump.

Kiss has also seen a jump, increasing 15.5% on the previous quarter (0.1% on the previous year), while Heart breakfast positively leaps 44.2% from the last quarter (a more modest 8.8% up the last year).

And on Absolute Radio, as Christian O’Connell was approaching his tenth anniversary (since passed) he was up 22% on the quarter (29% on the year) to 422,000.

All of these astounding leaps are likely to be down to some very low overall listening numbers in London last quarter as mentioned above.

The chart above shows Radio 2 and Radio 4’s performance across the day, and I think demonstrates their importance in the overall radio ecology.

If we remove All Radio, you can see that although Radio 2 is the bigger station, there are times during the day when Radio 4 is bigger.

At 8am in the morning, the stations are particularly closely matched.

Overlaps

I did some of these a few quarters back, and I thought it was worth looking at again. Here I’ve shown the overlaps between sister stations of the same brand to show how not everyone who listens to the sub-brand listens to the main station as well.

Note that in terms of design, these are only rough approximations and not accurately sized. Also each chart is only really consistent within itself. Still you can see easily the relative sizes, and the numbers are accurate.

Slide4

Slide3

Slide2

Slide1

This is the biggest example here of a unique audience to the sub-brand who don’t listen to the main service.

Slide5

D2 – The Second National Commercial Multiplex

Also just announced and worth mentioning, although not really part of RAJAR, is the full line-up for Sound Digital – the second national commercial DAB multiplex. They’re going to squeeze a massive 18 services onto one multiplex. I think it’s fair to expect that none of the regular DAB services will be in stereo (The DAB+ services will be however!).

Yes – most DAB radios are mono. But some aren’t, and a mono service just sounds worse than a stereo one. Music is, after all, made in stereo. The real place where it makes a difference is in car. Listen to Radio X and 6 Music in a car, and the difference is massive. One sounds much more enveloping that the other. Even as a listener if you don’t know why one sounds better, it will. Moan over.

For the most part, the new services launching – both here and elsewhere – are spin-offs of known brands. In due course it will be interesting to see whether audiences are pulled over from the BBC, or whether the current audience to these services will be divided up a little more. In some ways, neither matter. If new services can be delivered on a cost-effective basis, and audiences are happy with what they get, then that works well for radio groups.

A few services like Planet Rock and Absolute 80s, are shifting across to the new multiplex – leaving space for the likes of Heart Extra to launch on D1. The move to D2 will cost those services listeners however, since the geographic coverage of D2 just isn’t as good, and some people currently listening to those services on DAB will no longer be able to.

On another note it’s interesting to see a few new services not previously announced appearing on the mux.

So we have Magic Chilled (a second Magic sister service) which will be sitting alongside the also the new and now slightly renamed Mellow Magic (as opposed to the slightly odd ‘Magic Mellow’ as it was initially announced).

British Muslim Radio will now be called Awesome Radio. And as previously announced, Share Radio will be taking slot that was initially going to be used by TalkBusiness.

Finally, both Fun Kids and Jazz FM will both be appearing in DAB+ (in stereo), which is good news for both services. The big unknown is what percentage of DAB radios currently in use are DAB+ compatible. I’ll know doubt be evaluating the radios in my own home come the end of the month.

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 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 site.
Global Radio’s site.

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos-MORI/RSMB, period ending 20 December 2015, 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.

RAJAR Q3 2015

RAJAR Q4 2013

This post is brought to you in association with RALF from DP Software and Services. I’ve used RALF for the past 8 years, and it’s my favourite RAJAR analysis tool. So I’m delighted to be able to bring you this analysis in association with it. For more details on RALF, contact Deryck Pritchard via this link or phone 07545 425677.

The end of October brings Halloween, and also the latest set of RAJAR numbers. Insert your own joke about the two of them here.

Let’s have a canter through the numbers and see how stations have done.

National Stations

At a time of intense scrutiny over Charter Renewal, BBC radio has had a really good RAJAR with increases nearly across the board.

Radio 1 has seen its second increase in reach in a row, heading over 10.5m listeners again, and even seeing a fractional year on year increase. Hours are very marginally down, and I fear that it will be this measure that people should really be looking at, or average hours per listener (currently 6.3) rather than reach itself.

Radio 2 has also recorded a second consecutive rise, and is heading back towards the dizzying heights of 15.5m listeners. Listening hours have fallen a little this quarter, but are still up on the previous year. The average Radio 2 listener listens for 11.8 hours a week.

Radio 3 experienced its traditional Proms uplift, and is once again just north of 2m listeners. While Radio 4 has also had a a decent result with 10.8m listeners, although like Radio 3, saw some listening dropoff over the summer.

Radio 5 Live is also looking to finally recover a bit from its big schedule changes, now a year ago. It’s back to 5.5m reach, although it’s still down on last year.

But it’s the BBC’s digital channels that really bear some examination, as they continue to grow massively. Radio 4 Extra has just broken its own record reach of a couple of months ago, with 2.2m people listening a week. Over on 5 Live Sports Extra, Ashes cricket would seem to have been the catalyst for yet another record reach for that station, with 1.7m listeners and nearly 7m hours (also a record). And 6 Music has also had record reach and hours with just fewer than 2.2m listeners a week, and it has passed 20m hours for the first time.

All of that means that BBC Radio accounts for 53.3% of all radio listening in the UK (with Radio 2 accounting for 17.5% on its own).

Does that mean commercial operators have had a dreadful quarter? Well not exactly.

Classic FM has had a very decent quarter, up 4.0% in reach to very close to 5.5m, as well as a similar increase in hours.

Talksport has also had an excellent quarter with a 3.9% increase in reach, taking it very close to 3.2m listeners. Indeed, both Classic and Talksport are very consistent players.

Absolute Radio has had an excellent quarter. It’s reach is up to over 2m for the first time since 2008 – in other words, for the first time since it rebranded from Virgin Radio. Hours are down a fraction, but that needs to be put into perspective with the network performance (see below).

Absolute 80s had a slight fall from last quarter’s record reach. On the other hand, Absolute 70s saw its reach climb to a new all time high.

Kiss had a good quarter, up 5.2% in reach, although listening hours fell. Like Radio 1, I fear that these need to be monitored very carefully.

Kiss Fresh did well getting over 500,000 again in reach, while Kisstory was flat at 1.3m.

Capital Xtra saw a big jump this quarter, up nearly 25% in reach, and nearly 20% in hours. I can’t really explain that change – although in the London market we’re used to that sort of thing.

LBC was flat in reach with just shy of 1.5m listeners – still equalling its record reach since turning truly national. Hours did dip a little however.

Xfm became Radio X on 21 September, the day after the end of this RAJAR quarter. As such, although Radio X appears in the survey for sales purposes, in actuality, it was recorded by listeners as Xfm at the time. But the impending closure of Xfm perhaps piqued listeners’ interest because reach across the network surged up to over 1m – a 14% increase on the previous quarter. Otherwise there’s simply no information in this survey as to how Radio X is performing.

Networks

As alluded to above, the Absolute Radio Network achieved a new all-time high of nearly 4.2m listeners. Hours dropped off a little, but the strength of digital performance has been key to Absolute Radio’s success.

The Capital Network has performed well this quarter up 4.9% in reach, and also seeing an increase in hours. In this period, Capital’s owners, Global Radio, bought Juice FM in Liverpool from UTV. The rebranding is apparently due for early next year, so look for the Capital Network to continue to grow.

The Heart Network also had a good quarter with its reach up 3% to just over 9.1m for the first time. It’s a new record for them.

Overall Global Radio now reaches 22m people a week listening for 194m hours.

Bauer Radio reachs 16.7m people listening for 146m hours. Both major groups are up. It’s a competitive landscape out there.

It’s worth noting that both Global and Bauer actually sell even larger audiences since they operate as sales houses for some other groups.

UTV is the third biggest group, and following the sale of the television assets to ITV, and that of Juice FM to Global, I would expect a corporate rebrand will be forthcoming, particularly with their D2 services due to launch next year. They did suffer a little unlike their big competitors, down 2.5% in reach, although broadly flat in hours. They reach 4.4m people a week delivering 32m hours.

Overall Radio Listening

Overall, radio listening is down a fraction on last quarter, but flat on the year. 89% of the population listen to the radio at least once a week, spending 21.6 hours doing so.

Breakfast

It’s breakfast that gets a lot of people excited, so here are a few highlights from this quarter.

Nick Grimshaw has seen his audience fall a small amount, with a 1.0% drop from last quarter, set against an overall increase for the station.

Chris Evans has also seen a a drop, losing about 275,000 listeners on the previous quarter.

The Today Programme on Radio 4 is of course the second biggest “breakfast show” in the country, and it has increased a little to nearly 6.8m listeners this quarter (up 1.2%).

In the commercial world Christian O’Connell saw a big jump, up 6.2% to 1.8m listeners across the entire Absolute Radio Network of services.

Aled Jones on Classic FM has nearly 1.7m listeners, up 1.8% on the last quarter. But Alan Brazil has seen his reach drop to just below 1.4m listeners on Talksport (again, against an overall station rise).

The Kiss breakfast nationally has fallen nearly 10% this quarter, and LBC will be disappointed with Nick Ferrari falling 12% this quarter to just over 900,000.

London

London listening is always interesting, with a competitive marketplace and a surprising degree of change from RAJAR period to RAJAR period (disturbingly).

The chart above shows the reach of the main commercial stations in London, as well as BBC London (or BBC Radio London as it is now known).

What this chart shows in particular is that Capital and Kiss are neck and neck in reach terms. In fact, Kiss shades Capital by 3,000 people this quarter. But Capital will also be able to say it’s the biggest [commercial] station in London with more listening hours than Kiss.

This chart also illustrates to what extent Heart’s reach has bounced around over the last few quarters. From a record low in Q3 2014, they bounced up in Q4, bak down in Q1 2015, then surged in Q2, before falling down again this quarter. You could make a decent rollercoaster out of Heart’s performance chart.

Otherwise LBC and Magic have had disappointing reach perforances this time out, with Absolute flat, and both Smooth and Xfm seeing increases – the latter again perhaps because of its imminent demise towards the end of this period.

Finally BBC London got its best result in a couple of years just ahead of its rebrand. There’s a new schedule coming there soon too, so it’ll be one to watch.

Finally, because people tend to forget it, it’s worth reminding ourselves that Radio 4 is actually the biggest station in London with 2.7m listeners and 31m listening hours (i.e. 3 times what the largest commercial station gets!). Radio 2 is actually number 2, while Radio 1 slots in behind Kiss, Capital and Magic.

Digital

The big news here is that 41.9% of listening to radio is now via a digital platform. This figure had been threatening to creep over 40% for a while, and it’s now onward to 50% which is what gets people talking about digital switchover in radio.

At the same time, those who say they listen via AM/FM has fallen to below 50% for the first time (The difference is made up of people who don’t state their platform).

Both DAB and internet listening are up to record levels with 27.7% of listening being via DAB, and 6.9% of listening via the internet, including mobile apps.

The chart above really makes clear the growth in internet listening, although broadcast DAB is still much more important.

The chart below shows listening through the day (Mon-Fri average) by the different platforms. AM/FM listening is the most normalised, while the morning and evening drivetime peaks for DAB aren’t as clearly defined because we’re less likely to have DAB in our cars.

Internet listening tends to be a post-lunchtime thing, with a peak at around 5pm. One could surmise that a lot of that is at work, but the listening on that platform continues into early evening.

On the other hand, digital TV has a clearly defined daytime trend.

Listening Location

It’s a while since I last looked at this, and although it rarely changes much, I thought it was useful to put some updated information out there on where people listen to the radio.

It doesn’t move around massively, with listening at home making up the vast majority of listening.

But with the growth of digital in-car offerings, as more and more people connect their smartphones to their car’s entertainment system (Or “infotainment” system as the manufacturers would have it), I thought it was worth seeing the extent to which internet listening in-car is growing.

We know that services like Apple Carplay and Android Auto are coming soon, and already in select models, so this will be something to keep an eye, particularly given the range of audio options the connected car will offer the driver.

The numbers are a little “fuzzy” since some of the sample sizes, particularly for 15-24s, are low. But this shows that digital is beginning to make an impact in-car, with nearly 20% of in-car listening being via a digital platform. That drops to just 1.0% for internet radio, although it’s 3.0% for the younger 15-24 demographic. Something to keep an eye perhaps, as people get better data plans, and they find it easier to hook-up their phones to their cars.

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 analysis including London
Matt Deegan has some great analysis
Media Guardian for more news and coverage
The BBC Mediacentre for BBC Radio stats and findings
Bauer Media’s site.
Global Radio’s site.

[Updated to correct a 1Xtra/6 Music figure]

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos-MORI/RSMB, period ending 20 September 2015, 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.

RAJAR Q2 2015

RAJAR Q4 2013

This post is brought to you in association with RALF from DP Software and Services. I’ve used RALF for the past 8 years, and it’s my favourite RAJAR analysis tool. So I’m delighted to be able to bring you this analysis. For more details on RALF, contact Deryck Pritchard via this link or phone 07545 425677.

The first thing to say is that this has been a good quarter for radio as a whole. Overall reach is back to 90%, and listening hours have increased too, with the average radio listener listening for 21.7 hours a week – the highest in a couple of years.

Commercial radio is likely to be pleased too, since it has gained back a little from the BBC, with 44.4% of listening being commercial (up from 42.8% last quarter), compared with 53.0% to the BBC (down from 54.4% last quarter). Commercial has gained too, compared with this time last year.

And because it’s always keenly watched, the number of people who listen via a digital platform at least some point during the week has grown to over 60% of the population for the first time (61.1% up from 59.8% last quarter). The amount of listening via those platforms has also grown – up to 39.9% of all listening.

Let’s look in a bit more detail at the performances of some of the key players.

National Stations

Radio 1 has notably bounced back since last quarter’s results. Indeed those previous numbers do now look a little of an aberration, and are a reminder that nobody should ever judge a station’s figures on the basis of a single RAJAR period. The station’s reach has increased by 7.6% and is back over 10 million, while hours have increased by 3.3% on the previous quarter. It’s true that they’re still down on the previous year, but I think they’d take these numbers.

Radio 2 has also improved from last quarter a fraction – but you would probably argue it’s results are flat. Still not bad for the biggest station in the UK/Europe/World/Universe (Delete as applicable).

Radio 3 has dropped below 2m again, although it’ll undoubtedly return next quarter (Proms), but its listening hours are up nearly 5% (and enormously on the previous year).

Here’s an interesting question: who do you think has the higher average age? Radio 3 or Radio 4?

In fact, the average age of a Radio 3 listener is 57, and that of a Radio 4 listener is 56. The variability of those averages is probably quite different however.

Radio 4 fell marginally this quarter, although it’s up on the previous year and still reaches 10.6m people a week.

Five Live is still clearly finding its feet following all its schedule changes, and is back down this quarter – 7.6% down in reach, but only 2.4% down in hours. That does leave it well down on the previous year however. And there’s not really a big summer of sport to help get things straightened out, so it’ll be worth watching.

Classic FM will be disappointed with its results. It’s reach and hours are both down on the quarter and the year, with reach in particular at an all time low under the current RAJAR methodology (so since 1999). It still reaches nearly 5.3m people, but it’s something to keep an eye on. There can be a bitter war of words between it and Radio 3, when they think the latter is dumbing down to appeal to Classic FM’s audience. But Classic FM’s audience is 2.5x Radio 3’s, and as we’ve established, Radio 3’s audience fell this quarter too.

Talksport will also be disappointed by this set of results, which include the end of the football season. Both reach and hours are down on the previous quarter, and over 10% down on the previous year. It’s reach still hovers above 3m, while hours are above 20m. It’ll be hoping that the forthcoming sister services which are due to launch next year on D2 will help grow a “Talk” network.

Meanwhile the main Absolute Radio station has seen its reach stay flat while hours have grown – quite substantially on the year. With the station due to take over the West Midlands FM licence currently used to broadcast Planet Rock, it should mean some further growth in the coming quarters (although such format switches always take time to bed in locally).

National Digital Stations

Overall Bauer has had a very good quarter with several of its brands achieving record audiences.

The Absolute Radio Network now reaches a record high of 4.04m people a week with just less than 32m hours. And that’s without including Planet Rock’s figures with which it is bundled when sold. That comes off the back of yet more growth on Absolute 80s which jumped another 10.7% in reach on the previous quarter, and much more on the previous year. At 1.6m reach, it’s getting ever closer to the 2.0m that the main brand gets. (I remain uncertain as to the plan to move Absolute 80s off D1 and onto D2 at launch, since the lower reach of the new multiplex must surely effect these numbers negatively. We’ll have to wait and see).

The Kiss Network has also achieved some great growth with over 5m reach and 30.5m hours – both records. These are helped especially by some very significant improvements in Kisstory which has seen nearly a 30% increase in reach and a more than 40m increase in hours. And Kisstory has yet to launch properly nationally on DAB, currently only appearing on a series on local DAB multiplexes.

The nascent Magic Network also did well. It too has a sister station due with D2.

Global Radio has perhaps more of a mixed bag this quarter.

The Capital Brand has increased in reach and hours this quarter – a modest 1.9% in reach, but a more chunky 9.7% in hours. But both are down on the previous year.

Heart is more disappointing. Overall it’s down 1.4% in reach and 6.8% in hours, with both measures down on the year too. It’s also not clear when the previously announced Heart Extra is likely to launch which might help prop up the brand a little. It was announced in December last year, but the presumed spot on the D1 multiplex was retained by Premier Christian Radio after negotiations with multiplex operator (Premier has signed up until 2028 according to reports).

Smooth has also shown some disappointing results this quarter, down in reach and hours, although not as bad on the year. While Xfm is flat in reach, but down further in hours – another 7% down on the quarter and 12% down on the year. The radio industry is currently awash with rumours that Chris Moyles is going to Xfm, which may even get a full rebrand and relaunch. We’ll have to see.

LBC has had some very strong results, with its reach up strongly on both the quarter and the year. The station is now showing some real growth since it went national towards the start of last year. We could be in for some interesting battles between LBC and Talkradio once it launches.

It feels like every quarter that I report that 6 Music has had a record reach. Well it hasn’t this quarter – it’s actually down by a paltry 9,000 listeners. But it’s had record hours. With its listeners spending 9.1 hours a week, this is not an “additional” station, this is very much a main station for those 2m people.

1Xtra has had a strong quarter, up a lot in reach (14.2%) and an enormous amount in listening hours (47%). This probably reflects a bit of freak set of results last quarter as much as anything though.

Radio 4 Extra had extraordinarily high results last quarter, so perhaps unsurprisingly it has fallen – back below 2m listeners. It is still well up on the previous year though (+25% in reach and +37% in hours), so I’d say that it’s still a confidently growing station.

And it’s been a very strong result for 5 Live Sports Extra – even in a period before The Ashes began (although there was other cricket). Reach is up 21% and hours are up nearly 50%! Even though this represents a record high reach, I would expect both figures to increase further with the current Ashes campaign driving them.

Finally, since it’s very close to home for me now, I should report that listening to the BBC World Service is up very a very solid 14% in reach on the quarter and a similar amount on the year. Hours are a more modest 3% up.

London Stations

While I’m sure some readers think that London radio gets too much attention paid to it, I always think as much as anything it’s worth paying to attention to because it’s proved a good indicator of where radio is heading in the UK as a whole. It’s obviously of key importance to agencies buying advertising on commercial stations as well.

The figures this quarter show that all radio listening is at 89% (up from 86%) which compares well with 90% overall. What that means is that although Spotify, Apple Music and everyone else is fighting it out for supremacy, it’s not had a massive impact on radio… at least not yet. Indeed radio listening in London is up 9.4% on the previous quarter too, with radio listeners in London spending an average of 20.5 hours listening to the radio every week. So perhaps last quarter’s numbers were a one-off?

Interestingly, most of that growth this quarter has come from commercial radio with the BBC broadly flat in reach, and up 2.8% in hours. It’s also worth pointing out that in London, unlike nationally, commercial radio is more listened to than the BBC, with 51.0% of listening compared with the BBC’s 45.6%.

That all said, Radio 4 remains the most listened to station in the capital, but you’re really interested in the battle between the commercial stations aren’t you?

I think the big London news is that Global has had a great quarter. Capital has scored its highest reach in quite a while, jumping 22.7%. And it’s hours are also up 20.7%. That gives Capital the number one commercial spot in London, as it just beats Kiss. The 80,000 difference between the two is about the number of people who get to go to Capital’s Summertime Ball! Its sister brand Capital Xtra has also done well – up to such a great extent, that we know that last quarter’s data probably shouldn’t even be looked at.

Heart too seems to be back from a recent slump, jumping nearly 30% in reach to close to 2m. Hours growth is more modest, but it’s back over 10m.

Meanwhile it turns out that Xfm isn’t dead in London, and Smooth too is turning it around.

LBC is again a strong performer, and its listening hours shouldn’t be underestimated – it’s number two in London under that measure.

But number one in hours is Bauer’s Kiss which has also had a very strong reach performance jumping to 2.12m – its highest ever. It’s hours were up 26% on the quarter and reach up 12.6%. With Magic putting in some solid growth in reach and hours, only Absolute Radio’s London performance will have disappointed them a little (down in reach and hours on the quarter although up on the year).

Breakfast

I’m not going to dwell long on this and just consider Radio 1 and Radio 2, since both presenters have some interesting new TV jobs coming up and it’ll be worth seeing whether it makes any difference to their ratings over the coming months.

Nick Grimshaw takes on co-presenting duties of The X-Factor later this month, and this quarter has seen his reach increase by 6.2% to 5.8m. While Chris Moyles has previously had in excess of 7m listeners for the Radio 1 breakfast show, we’ve not seen numbers like that since the start of 2012. The other thing to watch here would be any kind of “Moyles effect” should he show up on Xfm, and should Xfm be given a significant marketing budget and be made available nationally on DAB. Lots of ifs there. And it’s been a while since Moyles was on the radio, so where are those listeners now? Nothing is certain.

Meanwhile Chris Evans on Radio 2 has also had a decent set of results with increase in reach and hours. While neither are quite records, you’d have to go back to the start of 2012 to find the last time listeners spent so much time with Radio 2’s breakfast show. Evans of course, is taking over Top Gear from next year. And there’s also another run of TFI Friday planned. Can he keep all this up and his Radio 2 show? We’ll have to see.

No bubbles this quarter I’m afraid. Hopefully they’ll be back next time.

But instead, I thought I’d show you some audience overlap figures between some station pairings. Broadly speaking radio listeners hear fewer stations than TV viewers watch stations. But there are overlaps between services, and it’s always worth having a look to see who listens to otherwise similar stations – and who doesn’t.

Radio 1 v Capital Network

R1Capital

So just to explain this chart, it means that 2.4m people listen to both Radio 1 and Capital, while 7.6m Radio 1 listeners never listen to Capital, and 4.7m Capital listeners never listen to Radio 1 (At least across a single week).

Radio 2 v Heart (Network)

R2Heart

Radio 3 v Classic FM

R3Classic

Five Live v Talksport

FiveTalk

Radio 1 v Radio 3

Well – there was a Radio 1 Prom this year!

R1R3

NB. These charts are not necessarily quite to scale – I “hand” drew them in Photoshop.

Further Reading

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

The official RAJAR site and their infographic probably here
Radio Today for a digest of all the main news
Go to Media.Info for lots of numbers and charts
Paul Easton for analysis including London
Matt Deegan usually has some analysis
Media Guardian for more news and coverage
The BBC Mediacentre for BBC Radio stats and findings
Sadly the One Golden Square blog seems to have died, but you could try Bauer Media’s site.
And it’s entirely likely you’ll find Global Radio here.

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos-MORI/RSMB, period ending 28 June 2015, Adults 15+. One other thing to note is that RAJAR updates its population estimates in Q2 each year, so we’ve seen the UK adult population grow slightly this quarter, although only by 1.3% nationally.

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.

RAJAR Q1 2015

RAJAR Q4 2013

This post is brought to you in association with RALF from DP Software and Services. I’ve used RALF for the past 8 years, and it’s my favourite RAJAR analysis tool. So I’m delighted to be able to bring you this analysis. For more details on RALF, contact Deryck Pritchard via this link or phone 07545 425677.

Here we are with the first RAJAR release of 2015 and one of the usual times to take stock of the UK radio market.

In overall terms, radio remains strong with 47.8m people listening each week (89%) – fractionally down on last quarter, but generally holding its own. And adults who listen to the radio do so for 21.3 hours a week, again consistent with recent quarters.

Of course, I don’t have to tell readers of this blog, that the amount of listening you do to the radio is almost directly correlated to your age.

The older you are, the more radio you listen to. And the younger you are…

In the past, radio watchers like myself have always paid close attention to the amount of digital listening there is in the first quarter of the year. That’s because DAB radios have been given as Christmas presents to quite a large degree. But those jumps have lessened over the years, essentially because digital listening has become more normal. However, in Q1 2015, we have seen quite a jump, with 39.6% of all listening – or two fifths – being digital.

While I don’t think anyone could honestly say for certain when a digital switchover might take place, the 50% listening mark has always been a key marker, and we’re now at 40%.

That increase is coming across all platforms, but proportionately it’s being driven by internet listening, which has now reached an all time high of 6.8% of radio listening. That might seem pretty small, but three years ago it was at 3.9%.

What’s more, as the chart above shows, it’s being driven by younger audiences. Getting your internet/app offering right for this audience is critical. 28.3% of 15-34 radio listeners are using the internet every week.

BBC v Commercial

While overall radio listening is broadly flat, the commercial radio has given over share to the BBC this quarter. 54.4% of listening is to BBC radio, while 42.8% is to commercial radio. That’ll disappoint the commercial groups as they’d been gaining share for the last year or so.

National Stations

Not great figures for Radio 1 this quarter, as it falls below 10m reach for the first time since 2006. It’s 7% down on the quarter and 8% down on the year in reach. Listening hours aren’t quite as bad, but this’ll obviously be disappointing for them. It has dropped its average age a year (although as I’ve argued in the past, big shifts here are pretty impossible).

On the other hand, Radio 2 is pretty flat, losing 1% in reach but gaining it in hours. It remains with more than 15m listeners a week, each spending 12.2 hours with the station.

Radio 3 gains 2.7% in reach and a more significant 15.7% in hours (although it’s down on this time last year). Overall, pretty solid.

Radio 4 has also had a decent quarter gaining a few reach, but up again in hours by 8%.

It looks like the schedule changes that 5 Live put in place last year are now beginning to bed in, as its reach and hours have both seen solid increases (3% and 6% respectively). It’s still down on this time last year, but when you change your whole daytime schedule in a single swoop, that’s probably to be expected.

Classic FM has had a solid quarter, losing a handful of listeners on the quarter, but putting on listening hours.

And Talksport will be delighted to see 8% increases in reach and hours on the last quarter (and increases in the last year), as the station bounces back to over 3.2m listeners. The station will now be working out what it’s going to do with its planned series of sister stations, including a Talksport 2, launching next year.

National Digital Stations

1Xtra has had a bit of a drop this quarter falling 24% in reach and 42% in hours of last quarter. Even allowing for some variances in its figures, this is a big fall, and I couldn’t easily explain it away.

Radio 4 Extra has delivered some new record figures, gaining 26% reach in a single quarter and 15% in hours. It now has more than 2m listeners each week for the first time (2.2m in fact).

It has been an excellent quarter for 5 Live Sports Extra which has seen a record reach – more than doubling after last quarter’s drop. 1.3m people listened during the first quarter of this year. Obviously this is busy part of the sporting calendar for football, but perhaps the most important part of the schedule was the cricket world cup that took place during this quarter. It’ll be interesting to see what the BBC Trust says about the station’s recent request to put more original programming on the station.

6 Music has a small dip this quarter down 1% in reach, but with listening increasing. It’s up on the previous year too.

Absolute 80s is the biggest commercial digital radio station and has posted some all time record figures, a smidgen under 1.5m in reach with 9.3m hours.

The Absolute Radio Network is flat at 3.9m reach (I mean it’s completely flat at 3.893m this quarter and last quarter!). Hours are up to over 30m for the first time since Chris Evans was at the station – so the first time in a long time!

The overall Magic network (including London) has seen a big jump in the last quarter with 3.6m listening for 18m hours.

Planet Rock has had a very good set of figures, putting on 12% in reach and 13% in hours adding to an overall strong digital portfolio for Bauer. (The exception being the unloved The Hits, which has had its worst reach figure ever.)

The Capital Network (including Capital Xtra) has fallen back a little this quarter, while the Heart Network is basically flat overall.

Jazz FM will be disappointed to see its reach drop by 11% in the quarter, and experience a smaller fall in hours.

London Stations

There’s a view that I share, that London can often foretell trends in radio, perhaps by about a year. If that’s the case, then there is serious concern in this RAJAR, because the proportion of Londoners who ever listen to the radio has fallen to 86% for the first time (remember it’s at 89%) nationally. Now 3% mightn’t seem that much, but only five years ago it was at 93%.

What’s more, the cumulative number of listening hours has fallen below 200m for the first time since the methodology changed in 1999. Again, it’s just a number, and it’s perfectly possible that it’ll come back next quarter, but these are not good omens.

What that means is that overall radio listening is down in London this quarter, meaning that many stations have experienced losses without other stations necessarily picking up listeners.

Magic isn’t one of those stations however. It’s number one in London in reach (1.9m up 8.4%) and hours (9.8m up 8.5%).

However Global will not be pleased with the results from its key brands in London. Capital has seen a 4% fall in reach and 12% fall in hours on the previous quarter (and the numbers are worse on the year). But for Heart, the numbers are even worse, with a 14% fall in reach and colossal 28% fall in hours. Even the usually solid LBC has had a very poor quarter with a 19% fall in reach and a 17% fall in hours. Factor in falls in Capital Xtra (down 51% in hours), Xfm (down 57% in hours) and Gold (a less bad fall of 34% on a small base), and it’s not great news for Global’s offering in London.

Kiss also had a fall, down 1.5% in reach and 8.2% in hours. On the other hand Absolute Radio jumped back massively after a couple of disappointing results with a 33% increase in reach and an 82% increase in hours.

I’ll repeat what I always say in these situations, and that’s that you need to keep an eye on trends, and that you should always question any station experiencing double digit changes in figures in any given quarter.

Breakfast

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Radio 1’s overall picture, Nick Grimshaw has seen his numbers fall with his reach down 7% on the previous quarter at about 5.5m

Chris Evans has last a few listeners on Radio 2, but nothing he can’t afford to lose. He’s now down to “just” 9.5m.

On Absolute Radio’s network of stations, Christian O’Connell remains flat on a still decent 1.6m listeners.

In London it’s fun and games as ever. Rickie, Melvin and Charlie and the number one commercial breakfast show up about 1% with 879,000 listeners. It’s just 7,000 ahead of Dave and Lisa at Capital who have fallen 7% to 872,000. Next up is Magic with 747,000 (although it too has fallen). Heart is down too with 627,000 (down 8% on the qtr). Christian on Absolute Radio’s network has increased his reach by 8% on the quarter to 585,000. And spare a thought for Jon Holmes on Xfm – down 52% to 118,000 (although Russell Brand podcasts or not, the brand does feel unloved by Global).

Bubbles

Finally the bubbles…

(Note that Google has updated the way these charts work again, and while it seems to be much faster to use now, I haven’t been able to make the chart any larger. So clicking here, will give you more details on how the chart works, but it won’t currently make it bigger. I’m working on it. Sadly, I’ve not been able to update the London chart just yet.)

Further Reading

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

The official RAJAR site and their infographic
Radio Today for a digest of all the main news
Go to Media.Info for lots of numbers and charts
Paul Easton for analysis
Matt Deegan usually has some analysis
Media Guardian for more news and analysis
One Golden Square for more Absolute Radio and Bauer details
The BBC Mediacentre for BBC Radio stats and findings

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos-MORI/RSMB, period ending 5 April 2015, Adults 15+.

Disclaimer: These are my views alone and do not represent those of anyone else. Any errors (I hope there aren’t any!) are mine alone. Access to the RAJAR data is via RALF from DP Software as mentioned at the top of this post.