Driving DAB Forward

Recently, I’ve been thinking of investing in a new car. I’ve only ever bought one, quite a few years ago now and while it still works, it’s just getting a bit tatty and really, it would be nice to upgrade. The problem is though I don’t really know much about cars. So, like a good researcher, I decided to have a look around to gather as much information as possible and make an informed decision on that basis.

Naturally in my line of work, a priority is to have access to a DAB radio which my current car does not, the CD player it does have just doesn’t cover my needs in this day and age. Earlier in the year I’d read various reports of new car manufacturers coming on board and now fitting digital radios to their fleet. In fact the rate of growth looks pretty impressive – it was widely reported that by April 2014, 55% of new cars came with DAB installed as standard. This compares to just over 37% in the previous year. While at this point it may not be at the lofty levels that were once targeted, this growth is showing that the car industry is now well and truly on board with the UK’s digital plans.

The next challenge though is getting these cars on the road with people using their DAB and consuming digital radio, then we can start to see these numbers filter into the listening figures. The current figures, Quarter 2 2014, which were released by RAJAR today show a reasonable amount of DAB listening in-car (the precise RAJAR definition is ‘Car/Van/Lorry’). It’s true that the majority – 88% – of all in-vehicle hours, comes on an AM or FM platform, but as I’m neatly proving, changing a car, for most people at least is not a particularly frequent event, reducing that dominance is not going to happen overnight. Overall this quarter, 11% of all in-car hours are consumed via DAB which is an increase on the previous quarter, and year. If the number of enabled cars has increased, this figure should gather pace as they hit the road.

It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that there is a little online/app listening in car too, accounting for around 1% of all hours. There may be more progress to come in this area too if the likes of RadioPlayer continue to work on the connected car and develop links with manufacturers. This also relies on the continued roll-out of stronger and more consistent mobile internet connections.

RAJAR Quarter 2 also shows there is an appetite for digital radio in general. While the overall level of digital listening is comparable with Quarter 1 – 51% reach and 37% of hours recorded on a digital platform – at an individual station level there are some interesting numbers. One result that has been threatening to happen for a while now is that BBC 6 Music has overtaken BBC Radio 3 in terms of number of listeners, albeit by a small margin (1.891m vs 1.884m listeners respectively). 6 Music has been the standard bearer for digital only stations for a few years now and to finally overhaul an established station such as Radio 3 is quite a feat.

In the Commercial sector, most notably some of Bauer’s digital only Absolute stations have continued to build on their listener base – Absolute 80s is now established as a 1-million-plus listener station. Heat and Kerrang (in its new configuration) are the pick of the other Commercial digital only stations, starting to nudge towards 1 million listeners.

Slowly but surely the number of DAB enabled cars on the road will increase. As it does, we can reasonably expect to see in-vehicle digital listening continuing to grow. Combine this with some excellent digital only radio and this is starting to look like an area to keep an eye on. I’m doing what I can to contribute to this, a lot of the radio I listen to is digital, I just need to decide which car I should use to house my new DAB radio.

Andy Haylett is Director at Ipsos MediaCT.