The snow helps boost local radio listening
Today RAJAR have released their latest set of radio audience figures as Quarter 4 2010 goes live. Every three months, station controllers, presenters, Finance Directors, and so on, eagerly anticipate the update on the performance of their stations. With 46.7m adults listening to the radio in an average week (up 1.7% on the same period last year), the wealth of data collected always tells many stories and this release is no exception. Cast your mind back to what you were doing during the closing months of 2010, we have updates on the impact of the snow on people's listening behaviour, the breakfast shows and the much-covered topic of digital radio.
For several weeks at the end of last year the country was in the grip of Arctic weather conditions and some places were frozen to a standstill - while we were contemplating how to get to work, it was business as usual for the hardy Ipsos interviewer out pounding the streets in the name of diary placement! This is traditionally a time when BBC Local radio does well - the theory being that people tune in to catch details of local issues, school closures for example. This has again been demonstrated by the results. BBC Local stations have added nearly 700,000 listeners from the last set of results, however, there has been a small decline in the total hours of listening. This indicates that there are more listeners, but each listen for shorter periods. Maybe people are tuning in for local snow reports before disappearing outside to sledge or build snowmen, or settling down in the warm to watch TV?
Last time, we saw a dip in the number of listeners to the country's biggest breakfast shows on BBC Radio 1 and 2. Both Chris Moyles and Chris Evans have had a better quarter this time round, both increasing their audience by over 300,000. Moyles now has an average of 7.4 million listeners in a week while Evans has just over 8.7 million. One national breakfast show worthy of mention is BBC Radio FIVE LIVE, the station has recorded its highest reach for years, increasing their number of listeners by nearly half a million to surpass the 3 million mark (3.165m).
In the London Commercial Radio market, 95.8 Capital FM has retained its spot as the most listened to breakfast show and the only one with more than 1 million listeners. The biggest change has come with Heart London who shed some 100,000 listeners and dropped to fourth from second. Kiss 100 FM has added 108,000 listeners at breakfast and Magic 105.4 has added 66,000.
More than half of listening on a digital platform comes from DAB radios, the platform where a specific device is needed to listen (the others being over the internet or DTV) - it's a good marker to show how digital listening is progressing. Looking at the latest set of results we can see that over 18 million adults claim to own a DAB set in the household. The biggest step change comes before and after Christmas. According to the results, the DAB-owning population grew by 1.2 million between Q4 2008 and Q1 2009. The increase was more modest at 600,000 the following Christmas, but it was still the biggest period of growth over the year. History shows us that DAB ownership over the course of the year shows minimal growth. In 2009, the DAB-owning population grew by over 2 million; over 2010, growth has slowed a little to just over 1.3 million. I wonder if the jump from Q4 2010 to Q1 2011 may be smaller than that over the same period last year? As questioned in another Light Bite (Christmas is coming - will Santa bring you a DAB Radio?), the must-have technology such as Kindles and iPads have come down in price and are more accessible and arguably more desirable in our everyday lives - we shall see.
