No Drama Radio Ratings - No Fun, Games To Follow

Michael Hedges February 3, 2020 Follow on Twitter

Audience estimates - ratings - have been the common trading currency between advertisers and broadcasters for decades. As the nature of broadcasting has held users - listeners and viewers - at a distance a means was developed to estimate their existence lest the media buyers spend money placing ads into thin air. This plan has worked out fairly well for everybody and in time has become quite sophisticated. Both television and radio broadcasting are highly reliant on audience estimates. Streaming has changed this. Subscribers are the future.

UK radio measurement manager RAJAR released this week its mid-September to mid-December Q4 2021 data on radio listening. It was the second quarterly report after taking a hiatus in the spring of 2020 due to collection limitations caused by the coronavirus outbreak. As with many other media research agents, the RAJAR and Ipsos experts took this opportunity to make adjustments to methods and practices in consultation with stakeholder broadcasters and, of course, media buyers. Audience estimate data now comes from blended sources, including mobile phone apps.

There is almost no drama to the Q4 2021 RAJAR audience estimates. Comparisons with the Q3 2021 quarter are possible, relationships with earlier periods are completely out of bounds. Some stakeholders like this: the present moment is all that matters. Trends, even presented with statistical significance, are so last century. The top line number of total estimated radio listeners in the UK is unchanged quarter-to-quarter.

Weekly reach for BBC and commercial radio channels, separately, was virtually unchanged though estimated average hours listening share for BBC radio channels dropped a bit and rose a bit for commercial broadcasters. This suggests lower estimated time spent listening to BBC channels, slightly higher for commercial channels.

BBC Radio 2 continues to lead the national radio market with 16.4% reach share, up very slightly quarter-to-quarter. BBC Radio 4 is in second place, again, with 11.6% reach share, a dip from 12.1% in the previous quarter. Third place, again, went to BBC Radio1; 5.4% reach share, slightly higher.

The next three in the rankings were commercial channels Heart, Classic FM and Smooth, in order. BBC Five Live sports channel placed 7th, followed by commercial channel Capital and commercial new-talk channel LBC, BBC 6Music and Magic. Only LBC changed ranking from the previous period. None shifted reach share more than 0.2%.

Many UK media watchers paid considerable attention to the plethora of commercial radio brand extensions, which count in the dozens, offer mostly music and compete with static or the police calls. “All specialist ‘80s’ brands fell,” noted Mediatel (February 3), while ‘90s’ music brands are “ succeeding among the younger Gen X/early millennial market.” Times Radio and TalkRadio, two speech-based channels of News UK, principally owned by the Murdoch family, literally split their reach, the former down slightly and the later up.

The BBC has made no secret of moving beyond traditional radio. “These figures show the important role that BBC Radio plays in people’s lives, with 34.5m tuning in to listen live each week to our much loved stations,” said BBC Chief Content Officer Charlotte Moore in a statement quoted by RadioToday (February 3). “We also continue to see on-demand listening grow for both our radio programmes and podcasts, as audiences come to BBC Sounds to discover content to listen to whenever they want to.” Of course, the BBC and commercial broadcasters have different purposes for audience estimates.

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