Ratings Review: RAJAR Quarter 3 2005
Well, there are no real surprises in the big headline stories from these figures, publically available from the RAJAR website. BBC Radio 2 continues to hold the status of Most Popular National Radio Station, with over 12.8 million listeners. BBC Radio 1 comes next with over 10.3m listeners, with BBC Radio 4 just behind with over 9.6m listeners. BBC Radio 5 Live continues to score impressive ratings with just over 6m listeners. Not far behind them is the station that continues to be the most popular national commercial radio station, Classic FM. Although the station is down from last quarter, where they took 4th place from 5 Live, the station still manages to record an impressive 5.8m listeners every week.
However, it is also noticeable that some stations, which are national or semi national only on DAB Digital Radio, are performing more impressively than the remaining 2 original INR stations. Talk Sport continues to perform relatively badly with just over 2 million listeners a week, and Virgin Radio not much better on 2.5 million. However, the best of the national digital bunch is Heart, supported in no small measure by their London and Midlands FM operations, but it still manages to pull in over 3.25 million listeners. Also impressing in that league are Magic with over 2.9 million, Galaxy with over 2.5 miilion and Kiss with over 2.3 million.
On the local front, the commercial radio stations continue to perform quite impressively, with a combined listenership of almost 25 million. Now, whilst BBC Local and Regional Radio doesn't do quite that well, it still manages to record a reasonable 9.8 million listeners a week across the country, which is better than Radio 4 manages to achieve.
From my own west country perspective, there are some interesting figures for the local stations. BBC Radio Bristol and Somerset Sound are down 7,000 listeners from the previous quarter, but still, for a very competitive market like Bristol, the fact that the station gets 224,000 listeners, or an 18% reach, is still a good performance.
BBC Radio Cornwall only lost 2,000 listeners since last quarter, down to 155,000 or 36%, but expect both them and Pirate FM, which lost 4,000 listeners last quarter to 181,000 or 30%, to lose even more listeners when Atlantic FM launches next year.
