The Heat Makes Waves for Radio Listening

Walking to work through the wet, yellow and brown leaves this morning, summer seemed an awful long time ago.  It was a good summer though, assuming you like hot weather, and I definitely spent a lot longer sat outside in the garden than most summers I remember. Thinking back to it now as we hit dark mornings and days of sustained rain, it probably should not come as a surprise that the weather has some kind of effect on our media consumption habits. This could be said to be showing through on the latest set of RAJAR figures released in the early hours of Thursday 24^th October, covering late June to mid-September 2013 – otherwise known as peak summer.

So how has this played out in the numbers? Well, there are couple of results which may not be seen as particularly positive, but may well be down to the classic ‘Summer of ‘13’.

The first thing I noted on my quarterly tour through the data was that digital listening has slowed down its forceful upward march for the first time in a while. This is not the first time this has happened though; in fact the last time we saw a similar slowdown in digital listening was exactly this time last year, and it proved to be only temporary.  With the home being the primary location for listening to the radio, there does seem to be a correlation between summer, spending more time outside and radio listening taking a marginal hit in audience numbers.  Moreover, being outside and further from your own wifi connection, digital TV and less portable DAB set can make analogue listening an easier choice. I have long been of the opinion that online listening will drive the next push towards full digital radio adoption. The ubiquity of smartphones and tablets coupled with impressive, all-encompassing and importantly, free radio apps such as Radioplayer, for me, make streamed radio a highly attractive prospect for the long term health of radio. As the telephone networks start to increase the pace of the 4G roll out and wifi gets faster with an improved range, mobile app radio listening will become more accessible when not indoors so much.

As touched on above, radio is traditionally an ‘at home’ media, although in-car listening runs it pretty close in reach terms, and it is interesting to note that in Quarter 3 listening at home fell slightly from 76% in Q2 to 74%. This equates to around 1.2m fewer adults in the UK. Once again, we saw a drop in home-based listening last year, and this does make sense for the summer months.  Certain factors cause people to be out of home more frequently and there is likely to be a knock on effect to radio listening and other media consumption. As the days get shorter and colder I expect we will retreat back indoors, put the garden furniture and barbecue back in the garage and revert to our traditional ways. Conversely, however, in-home hours per listener have slightly increased – so we are seeing that while fewer people may be listening in home, they are listening on average for longer (16 hours per listener per week in Quarter 2, compared to 16.5 in Quarter 3). 

So what we’re seeing is probably a seasonal dip in radio consumption which is, by definition, seasonal and likely to be a short-term. In the past, when the numbers have gone down, they have typically gone back up again.  It is more a demonstration of how external factors, often outside of radio stations’ and listeners’ control, can affect media consumption habits. After all, by the end of 2012, digital listening was back on the increase and the descent into autumn forced us to spend more time inside. As last year’s dip was not a long term trend I do not expect our exceptional summer of ‘13 to have any long lasting damage.

Andy Haylett is a Director at Ipsos MediaCT.