{"id":2418,"date":"2008-11-24T21:35:56","date_gmt":"2008-11-24T21:35:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2008\/11\/radio_2_audienc\/"},"modified":"2008-11-24T21:35:56","modified_gmt":"2008-11-24T21:35:56","slug":"radio_2_audienc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/radio_2_audienc\/","title":{"rendered":"Radio 2 Audiences and The Age of Listening"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s an interesting question related to the Ross\/Brand affair. Yes, I know I said I was bored of the whole thing, but this is genuinely interesting.
\nDid Russell Brand actually cost Radio 2 listeners when he was on-air with them? (Or perhaps more reasonably, did he cost them listening hours, when regular Radio 2 listeners just tuned out until his show had finished?)
\nThis starts from a piece in the BBC Trust report<\/a>. It notes that Brand’s Saturday night 9-11pm show “attracted an average audience of around 400,000 listeners. Their average age was 50 and more than 40% were over 55. Just over half were women<\/em>.”
\nLooking at the RAJAR data for the most recent show, I see that Russell Brand reaches 382,000 listeners – close enough to the 400,000 the BBC quotes. The report states that the average age was 50, although I make the mean age (from reach with a base of adults 15+) to be 52. This is interesting because the mean age of the station overall is actually 50.
\nSo Russell Brand’s listeners were slightly older than the station average! I’d suggest that this comes of the scheduling of his show. Overall, 37.9% of Radio 2’s audience (based on reach, base – adults 15+) is aged under 45, but for Brand’s show this falls to 35.2%.
\nPut simply, younger people are more likely to be out at that time.
\nThis explains to a large extent, the numbers that then follow in the report:
\n“The programme was made available on the BBC iPlayer for seven days after broadcast. The edition of 18 October 2008 received 33,000 requests from UK-based users and a total of 44,000 around the world. It was also made available as a podcast for seven days from Monday 20 October and was downloaded 130,000 times in the UK and a total of 168,000 times around the world.<\/em>”
\nIt’s fair to assume that these podcast and iPlayer listeners are younger than average. Let’s assume their average age was 30. That’d mean that the overall average age of Brand’s listeners would still be relatively high at 45. It’s worth noting that Brand’s weekly podcast was second only<\/a> to Radio 4’s Friday Night Comedy.
\nYou might be sitting there thinking – well that’s not that<\/em> old (Ross is 48 after all). But a mean is only the average. A very significant proportion of those listeners are likely to be 45 or older. As the Trust report notes, over 40% of the RAJAR live listeners were over 55.
\nBut let’s return to that 400,000 – or 382,000 anyway. How does the same 9pm-11pm slot do between Monday and Sunday? (I’ve put shows in brackets, but Radio 2’s schedule does change fairly regularly, so I’ve listed programmes from the start of September which will be included in these RAJAR Q3 2008 figures).
\nMonday: 655,000 (Radcliffe & Maconie\/Big Band Special\/Jamie Cullum)
\nTuesday: 643,000 (Radcliffe & Maconie\/Nigel Ogden\/Various)
\nWednesday: 573,000 (Radcliffe & Maconie\/Trevor Nelson’s Soul Show)
\nThursday: 559,000 (Radcliffe & Maconie\/Mark Lamarr Reggae)
\nFriday: 509,000 (Friday Night is Music Night\/Various\/The Weekend w\/Claudia Winkleman)
\nSaturday: 382,000 (Russell Brand)
\nSunday: 511,000 (Russell Davies\/Malcolm Laycock)
\nSo clearly Saturday night is Radio 2’s lowest night of the week for that time-slot – by a significant margin.
\nBut hang-on. Is that Brand’s fault, or is it just because Saturdays are a poor night for radio listening in general because we’re all out, or watching X-Factor\/Casualty or entertaining or whatever?
\nBrand joined Radio 2 in November 2006. So let’s choose Q3 2006 – covering the period just before Brand started at Radio 2. Sadly, I don’t have listings for who precisely was<\/em> on the station at that time, but nonetheless, I do have the numbers:
\nMonday: 636,000
\nTuesday: 600,000
\nWednesday: 581,000
\nThursday: 581,000
\nFriday: 491,000
\nSaturday: 358,000
\nSunday: 586,000
\nSo poor Saturdays aren’t Brand’s fault. There are simply fewer listeners to be had on a Saturday night at that time compared with any other day of the week.
\nBut the average age back then for a Saturday night was 56.
\nI think that this, in the end, is the most important thing. While the difference between 52 and 56 might not seem all that great – shifting average ages by even a single year is actually very hard to do. This is particularly the case with a large station with a loyal audience.
\nAn older listener who doesn’t want to hear speech (Radio 4\/Five Live\/talkSPORT) or classical music (Radio 3\/Classic FM) only really has Radio 2 aimed at them on a national scale. Certainly there are services like Smooth or even Magic that also target that audience to a certain extent. But nobody else does it quite so well.
\nSo why not serve that audience with something they want at 9pm on a Saturday night rather than desperately trying to attract a younger audience?
\nNow Radio 2 would probably fairly point out that Russell was bringing new listeners to its station. But I still wonder if he wasn’t better suited to 6Music whose average audience age of 35 is closer to Brand’s – he’s 33? Or maybe even Radio 1 (average age… er, 33 – base: adults 15+)?
\nYou shouldn’t solely concern yourselves with demographics of course. Older performers can be perfectly well be appreciated by younger viewers and listeners (witness all the crooners who find a new lease of life when they perform at Glastonbury), but let’s not forget the service remit of Radio 2<\/a>:
\n“The remit of Radio 2 is to be a distinctive, mixed music and speech service, targeted at a broad audience, appealing to all age groups over 35.<\/em>”
\nIf I’m aged 70, and don’t want to listen to classical music, then Radio 2 remains the service for me.
\nPerhaps when the BBC next looks at its statements of policy, it should take account of the older audience to a greater extent. There are already more pensioners than there are under-16s<\/a>, and the fastest growing age-group in the UK is 80+<\/em>! This age-group has grown from 2.8% of the population to 4.5% of the population in the last 25 years. Sadly, pensioners have little spare income, which don’t make them an attractive audience for most commercial radio operators (witness the decline of Saga Radio<\/a> which attempted to target 50+). So it’s almost certainly going to need to be the BBC which picks up the slack and reaches out to this growing audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s an interesting question related to the Ross\/Brand affair. Yes, I know I said I was bored of the whole thing, but this is genuinely interesting. Did Russell Brand actually cost Radio 2 listeners when he was on-air with them? (Or perhaps more reasonably, did he cost them listening hours, when regular Radio 2 listeners […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-radio"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}