RadioWorks talks RAJAR results – The Q1 2019 results in detail
May 2019 RadioWorks Blog
What did we think of this quarter’s RAJAR results?
Our Marketing and Insights team talk through this quarter’s results.
Who has won the BBC/Commercial Radio battle in Q1 2019?
Commercial Radio remains triumphant, celebrating its ninth consecutive quarter in front with 36m weekly listeners vs the BBC’s 34m.
Which radio station is your RAJAR hero?
This quarter, it’s Virgin Radio!
Virgin Network’s Breakfast slot definitely gets a mention in this category as ‘The Chris Evans Breakfast Show’ sees exponential growth this quarter. Its audience is seven times larger this quarter with a whopping 1m listeners.
talkSPORT has also delivered a great set of RAJAR results with weekly reach above the 3m threshold for the first time in a year. The station continues to benefit from live coverage of major sporting events, along with its cricket and football rights. This is also reflected by the growth in listening hours which increased by 3.6%, climbing to a 20.1m total.
talkSPORT 2 and talkRADIO have performed exceptionally well. Sister station talkSPORT 2 achieved a record reach of 424k, gaining more than 100k listeners year-on-year. talkRADIO also smashed records, as their audience increased 7.3% year-on-year.
How would you describe digital radio’s results?
Digital Radio reaches new highs!
Listening share has climbed to 56.4%, up from 50.9% in Q1 2018, and remains above the 50% mark for the fifth quarter running.
Digital platform listening continues to grow year-on-year:
- DAB digital radio now accounts for 40% of all listening and 72% of digital listening, which equates to 10% growth year-on-year.
- Listening online and via app is now at 11% of all listening, and reaches almost 20% of digital listening, growing by 18%.
- Listening via DTV is at 5% of all listening and 8.8% of digital listening.
In-car digital listening achieves a new record share of nearly 42% of all in car listening and is up by 20m listening hours. Online listening at home increased by 16.3m hours, and in the workplace, DAB listening grew by 26% year-on-year.
With such positive growth, we’re eager to see how the increase in digital listening will affect the conversation about the digital switchover in the near future.
Which stations have had notable RAJAR results this quarter?
This quarter, LBC has seen its highest ever, with more than 2.3m weekly listeners. Breakfast host Nick Ferrari achieves a record high 1.3m weekly listeners across the UK. In London, the station itself remains London’s no.1 Commercial Radio station for share, with 5.7%. As Brexit continues to dominate politics, more people are tuning in to speech radio, and this is clearly mirrored in LBC’s latest RAJAR.
It’s worth mentioning that the newest addition to the Jack family, all-female ‘Jack Radio’, has driven excellent growth for the brand. Jack’s combined national and local reach has risen to 305k listeners from 201k, and elevated hours to 1.6m from 904k!
Decade stations also continue to do well, with Absolute 80s posting strong figures and pulling in 1.7m listeners every week. Heart 80s have added 110k listeners in the past three months alone with a record reach of 1.4m.
In the battle of Scottish stations, Clyde 1 reigns supreme with 541k listeners. The station is up 11.3% year-on-year and 1.1% quarter-on-quarter. Capital Scotland isn’t far behind with 528k listeners, which is slightly down from the previous quarter, however up from 488k last year.
We’re seeing great numbers from local stations as Fire Radio (73k), Lincs FM (280k), Pulse 1 (118k) and Sam FM South Coast (182k) all continue to grow their reach!
It will be interesting to see whether Local Radio benefits further from the programming change at Heart, Smooth and Capital as Breakfast becomes national.
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Get in touch here and we’ll talk you through the process and deliver the best audio solution for you.
