{"id":77479,"date":"2022-10-27T00:00:05","date_gmt":"2022-10-26T23:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/?p=77479"},"modified":"2022-10-27T00:00:06","modified_gmt":"2022-10-26T23:00:06","slug":"rajar-q3-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/rajar-q3-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"RAJAR Q3 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This post is brought to you in association with\u00a0RALF<\/em>\u00a0from\u00a0DP Software and Services<\/em>. I\u2019ve used RALF for the many years, and it\u2019s 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\u00a0Deryck Pritchard via this link<\/a>\u00a0or phone 07545 42567<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

After a brief gap when I missed Quarter 2, and then failed to catch up on the data, regular readers will be pleased to see that the RAJAR summaries are back!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the fifth set of RAJAR since data collection resumed, and as such, both quarter-on-quarter and<\/em> year-on-year comparisons can now be made. That all said, the methodology has evolved slightly over time, so there are probably a few issues that might be caused by those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall Trends<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Quarter 3 ran from 27th June until the 18th September, meaning that it incorporated some major news events like former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation on 7th July and the subsequent leadership battle (somewhat longer than the subsequent<\/em> leadership battle), and the death of the Queen on 8th September, and the period of mourning through until the day before her funeral on 19th September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quarter 3 obviously also includes school summer holidays – with perhaps more people wanting to get away this year following the pandemic period (not necessarily made easy by a shortage of staff at airports and the knock-on effects of flight cancellations). There would normally have been a World Cup, but that doesn’t start until next month. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Set against all of this, radio listening actually grew over the period, with listening hours up 2.5% on the quarter, coming back over 1 billion hours a week, and being up 1.0% on the previous year. 89% of the population listen to the radio every week, up by 1.4% on last quarter and 0.4% on last year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The average radio listener in the UK listens for 20.6 hours a week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there’s no doubt that commercial radio did much better than the BBC this quarter. While total BBC Radio<\/strong> listening increased by 0.2% on the quarter to 33.0m, it fell 4.6% on the year. And listening hours fell 0.6% on the quarter and fell 7.3% on the year to 477m hours. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime Commercial Radio<\/strong> grew 5.3% on the quarter and by 3.8% on the year to a total of 38.2m. Hours grew 6.5% on the quarter and 9.1% on the year reaching 520m. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That means that commercial radio leads in reach and hours, and has more than 50% of radio listening for the first time with 50.9% of listening. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only thing I would note is that the leap in commercial radio listening was significantly bigger than any overall growth they’ve seen before. The chart below shows historic commercial radio listening, and you can see that there is a significant uptick towards the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n