Radio listening in UK falling

And DAB take-up is stalling

26 July 2008 10:08 GMT / By Katie Scott

The latest stats are in and it seems that radio listening is taking a bit of a beating.

Overall radio listening is slightly down this quarter with 45.1m adults, or 89% of the population listening to radio each week.

BBC’s share of listening has dropped to 55.5% and all BBC stations have fallen on the quarter with the exception of Radio 3.

The beeb’s share of national listening has dropped to 46% (46.5% in Q1 2008) and BBC local listening is down to a 9.6% share versus last quarter's 9.9%.

Radio 1 has lost 7.5% of its listening hours, Radio 2 has lost 4.5% of hours and Radio 4 has lost 3.4% of hours.

And it seems not so many of us are tuning in to listen as we munch our cornflakes.

The once mighty Chris Moyles has lost over half a million listeners this quarter as has number one Breakfast DJ Wogan, with his Radio 2 show down 4.4% in reach.

In contract, Classic FM has seem some growth in hours with time spent listening up 1.4%.

The biggest winners were the Smooth, Magic, Kiss and Galaxy networks all up in both reach and hours.

In London, Magic has had the best results taking a record 7.4% share.

It now entertains a record 2m listeners every week, up 4.5% on the last quarter and also sees a 15.9% increase in hours to 14.8m.

Radio listening via a digital platform has remained steady over the past quarter but has increased year on year.

Data collected for Q2, 2008 reveals that 17.9% of all radio listening is now via a digital platform of which 11% is via DAB (7% in Q2, 2007), 3.3% is via DTV (2.6% in Q2, 2007), and 2% is via the Internet (1.5% in Q2, 2007).

But the number of DAB radio owners has not increased, and 72% of radio audiences still listen using analogue devices.

Full tags

Audio, Statistics, Radios, DAB Radios