Record of the Week

RAJARS

The latest RAJAR official UK radio listening survey is, as ever, accompanied with the usual hyped-up press releases from all sides. We always like to try and cut through the spin and give you a more rounded overall picture of what’s going on. The 2024 Q3 period began just as Glastonbury ended, and ran right up until about five weeks ago, taking in the General Election, Paris Olympics and Paralympics, plus the annual school summer holidays throughout the country. People were away, deputies filled in for usual presenters, and talk/news stations saw their numbers increase. Generally, and despite all this, things are positive or at least steady for the most part, so let’s dive in. 

Radio 1’s ship is back on an even keel. A year ago, their 7.773m figure was one of the worst on record. Now, it’s up 5% on where it was 2023 and stands at 8.179m, up on the last quarter too, and (as with all RAJAR numbers) is the total weekly audience aged 15+ who listen for at least 15 minutes at some point. If you add in school kids aged 10-14, R1 shoves just over 400k on top of that headline number, which’ll be very encouraging for the team there to see, particularly with so many other social media distractions pulling those youngsters with short attention spans away from radio listening. They’re the audiences of the future, so grabbing them and hooking them in pre-teen should prove habit forming.

Radio 2 remains the UK’s biggest radio station, ahead of all commercial rivals. It’s constantly in the spotlight with acres of column inches in the press and online news services devoted to its apparent demise, all of which are very much at odds with the real figures. 13.3m people listen every week. That’s almost a quarter of the entire UK adult population (23%, yet again, for the third quarter in a row), and those robust figures have barely changed since this time in 2023, despite a whole raft of new stations being launched elsewhere. Vernon Kay still has the biggest show on British radio, now with 6.8m listeners. Ken Bruce, his arch-rival (if the press were to be believed, that is) over at Greatest Hits Radio doesn’t even come close. He hits 4.019m between 10am and 1pm. But it demonstrates how much stronger mid-mornings are in UK radio as opposed to breakfast, which always was traditionally where the biggest audiences used to be pre-Covid. For example, LBC’s left-leaning host James O’Brien in the 10am-1pm slot was compulsive listening for news and General Election junkies during the summer, and he’s also posted his best stats to date with 1.5m. 

What’s going to be very interesting to watch though over the next six months is the gleeful media attention given to the Heart name when it inevitably usurps Radio 2’s topline figure, and just how much press spin there’ll be when it happens. Study those numbers closely. Global’s flagship station brand has 12.99m weekly listeners. They’re the no.1 commercial ‘brand’ by far. And you’ll note that it appears they’re only 300k behind the UK’s no.1 station overall. How’s it possible? Well, Heart’s network is a patchwork of local stations that have been rebranded under the same ‘turn up the feel-good’ ethos over many years and have been joined by spin off stations each dedicated only to 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s as well as Heart Dance. There are now a total of eight sister services alongside the main Heart network and Heart Scotland. Since September, Heart 10s has launched, along with Heart Musicals, and Love. Those new stations only need to pick up a new combined number of 500k per week to push the Heart name ahead of Radio 2. It's certainly achievable, and quickly. Oh, and Heart Christmas is additionally already running. With Global’s PR behind them, you can be sure they’ll all hit the ground running. For example, Heart 90s alone has grown to 1.3m this time around, which is their best figure ever, and Heart Dance now tops a million. We’ll see just how effective they’ve been in the next RAJAR Q4 survey. But remember this – you’ll be looking at the total combined weekly audience for ten/eleven separate commercial services, which clock up 5m+ between them all, versus just the one BBC behemoth, something that the anti-Auntie sections of the press will conveniently gloss over. 

We’ve already seen that sort of spin happening time and time again ever since Ken left R2 for Greatest Hits Radio. GHR’s rise coincided with the launch of Bruce’s show in Q2 last year, when Bauer rebranded lots of their own local stations, using the same idea that Global did with Heart. Growth was stellar, press was gushing, and sentiment against the BBC was brutal at times. Recently though that growth has stalled, plateaued and reversed. Yes, it’s still officially the “UK’s most-listened-to commercial station” when you take in their total combined listening hours of 64 million, but both the Capital network (9.7m) and the Heart network (7.5m without all those aforementioned spin-off services) are ahead with the total number of listeners versus GHR’s 7.4m per week. And the audience share for the brand overall is down slightly from 6.3% in Q1 to 6.1% now in Q3. Their reach had dropped by 95,000 people. OK, so it’s not a huge fall, but it’s a sign that listeners are switching around more and more. We’ve seen PR today still trumpeting year on year growth of 14%, which is true. However, that Y-O-Y jump was 76% in Q1, so the brakes are well and truly on, and we expect that constant rising number will soon disappear in future. Bauer announced this week that GHR will become a fully national network with no local programming commitments as of next month, so we’ll keep tabs on how much that affects their ongoing numbers. Expect a large marketing ad spend in the coming weeks to announce the arrival of Kate Thornton’s new mid-afternoon show on the station. 

Smooth Radio, owned by Bauer’s rivals Global, has again overtaken GHR in terms of total audience numbers. And Bauer’s Magic brand has taken a bit of kicking too. Smooth’s music went much more upbeat recently, and apparently Magic is currently going through a big shift in sound too, although when we looked at what’s been played so far today, it’s still a broad mix of all the usual suspects that are popping up like Robbie Williams, Lionel Richie, Queen, Take That, Spandau Ballet and ABBA to keep all late night mini cab drivers happy. 

Elsewhere, it’s the dance and R&B throwback playlist on Kisstory that helps it retain its place as the nation’s biggest digital commercial station on 2.3m. Ahead of Kisstory though, 6 Music remains the UK’s biggest digital station overall with a reach of 2.725m per week in Q3. However, its overall share of radio listening is down to 2.3%. That’s its lowest figure since the current methodology came into play in 2021 and the pull down has mainly been caused by its small drop-in average listening hours from 9 to 8.7. We’ve heard a lot of on-air changes recently with presenters and music, all of which will unsettle long-established loyal cores like the press-dubbed ‘6 Music Dad’ brigade, but standing still isn’t an option when there’s so much churn going on throughout the entire radio landscape. 6 Music does a genuinely solid job in retaining listeners and keeping them broadly happy all day long, no question. But we think there’s a major opportunity audience that another station could potentially grab if those disenfranchised forty-something blokes are now on the hunt for familiar-but-cool rather than unknown-and-challenging. Maybe Radio 2 could step in with big weekly show to target 45-54 males who grew up with 6 Music since its inception but maybe feel like their personal tastes no longer chime with the more frequent and quirky daytime diversions, some of which could feel self-indulgent to the ‘indie guitar’ diehards. 

Summing up, it’s a positive picture overall for UK radio across the board. The total audience of 50.9m adults per week is an all-time high. The total percentage is 88%. Commercial radio’s total listening share is 53.3% vs 44.5% for the Beeb. Every one of us listens on average to 20.5 hours per week, which is still remarkably high. Even the 77% of all 15-24s who listen to some radio station or other during the week are averaging 11.6 hours, so nearly an hour and 40 mins every single day. Of course, it’s those aged 55+ who are skewing the total average number higher, but it’s still encouraging to see under-25s haven’t deserted the medium just yet. The ongoing battle for both the BBC and commercial groups now is to keep them there and encourage growth for the future. We’ll find out how things are panning out next time when Q4 arrives on 6 February.