RotD Music Editor and radio aficionado Lee Thompson cuts through the spin of RAJAR Q2 2016

05 August 2016 - Press release

Poor Ben Cooper. The Radio 1 boss must be getting used to this by now. The latest quarterly RAJAR UK radio listening figures are out. You could 100% guarantee that that station’s numbers would be down and indeed they are, to their lowest level in 13 years, now less than 9.4m weekly reach. He’s inevitably reasoned with the “don’t blame me, guvnor…kids don’t listen to the radio anymore…and anyway they’re consuming our ‘brand’ online and elsewhere instead” lines that we’ve heard pretty much every three months for the past year or more. Now, that may be true to some extent, but we believe it’s again feeble ‘smoke and mirrors’ to try and deflect from the fact that what Radio 1 offers on the radio is increasingly irrelevant to under-25 consumers, many of whom simply find the output unpalatable and far from an essential part of their daily lives. Yes, you can quote YouTube viewers as much as you want, but those stats (3.15m subscribers) will take in every single person in the world who accesses that visual content. Not just the UK, and not just the age group you’re meant to be hitting. So that could mean your bespoke, targeted content is being seen and consumed by, for instance, a 40-something bloke in his flat in Santiago in Chile watching Innuendo Bingo on his laptop. And after all, that’s not radio in the universally-accepted sense. And certainly not the actual thing that these industry stats measure or track. As Matt Deegan points out in his excellent blog “Radio 1 remains, I imagine, the world’s best funded CHR (contemporary hits) radio station. £40m on content, significant cross-media marketing support and a digital team any other radio station would kill for. It’s “psychological” 10m reach point is now surely permanently broken and beyond defending. Arresting the decline of 15-24s and 15-34s (where this quarter they’re delivering lowest-ever reach and hours for both), is surely what it should now be concentrating on" [sic].

Incidentally Kiss in London is cleaning up on those core young demographics. You cannot escape the fact that they remain the No.1 station in the capital for 15-24 years-olds, 15-34 year-olds and 15-44 year-olds, whichever way you cut it. Listen to the station for an hour and compare it to Radio 1 for the same duration when you get the chance. You’ll instantly hear that Kiss just sounds more dynamic, welcoming, pacey, confident, lovingly-produced and thought through by Andy Roberts and his team. You’d be hard-pressed to attach many of those attributes to its rival. The average age of a Kiss listener is 30 (and an even younger 27 for their digital station Kiss Fresh). The average at Radio 1 is 35. 

One school of thought is that we’re edging ever-closer to Radio 1 potentially ceasing to exist as an actual fully broadcasting radio station 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on DAB and FM. In the same way that BBC3 TV has evolved into an online-only proposition, could the radio station morph into something similar? Many seem to think that the time is coming. How the UK music industry will react and cope if that day comes will most likely be with a sense of outrage and disbelief. But get ready, because the concept is not as far-fetched as you might expect. Watch this space, but with the 50th anniversary now just 13 months away, it could be the perfect opportunity to start afresh with this radical new proposal.

Once upon a time any station broadcasting without presence on FM or AM would be pretty much a non-starter. That changed dramatically in the mid-90s when Atlantic 252 appeared on crackly old long wave, somewhat-incredibly re-invented the medium as something hip (we’re still not entirely sure how, but they did and they made an absolute killing), and cleaned up across the UK with its tightly formatted mix of Top 40 current and recent hits, delivering some of the highest song rotations UK radio had ever recorded, many of which seem unlikely to ever be reached again. For example, No More I Love You’s by Annie Lennox was one of the prime biggies at the time, and was played almost 130 times a week for more than a month. Or every 75 minutes, day in day out.  Anyhow, rotations like that may have gone, but another familiar ‘90s throwback returned in the spring and has delivered a solid set of first results this period. The management at Virgin Radio will be pleased with their opening numbers for 2016. In fact, we heard the team spent most of Wednesday afternoon in the pub celebrating when the stats were released. Broadcasting on DAB, but also available online via the various ubiquitous radio apps, their 409,000 weekly reach straight out of the starting blocks is a hugely encouraging rebirth. Expect that number to grow stronger and stronger as more and more people engage (or perhaps re-engage) with it. Their next target should be half-a-million by the end of this year. We’ve liked what we’ve heard so far. Think of it as a neat halfway house between the best of Radio 1 and 2, with a skew on today’s contemporary adult hits and the best of the past 20 years from Britpop onwards.

Looking at the London picture, Radio 4 stays on top as the capital’s most-listened-to station by quite some distance, although this does seem to be a unique quirk of London itself, as there’s almost nowhere else in the country where this is the case. The rest of the Top 5 rankings are Radio 2 as runner-up, then Global-owned Capital in third (but the No.1 commercial station) followed by Bauer’s Kiss and Global’s Heart. Radio 1 is in seventh place (despite it being the only thing that most of our label contacts and industry folk have traditionally cared about for much of their careers) behind Bauer’s Magic. We’ve said it before, but shouldn’t you rethink your campaign strategies if five other music stations are grabbing more ears for your artists and songs than the one you still consider to be the benchmark for breaking acts?

We’ll see Radio 2 break more and more acts in the coming year or two, for sure. In the UK right now, there are more 18-34 year olds living with mum and dad than at any other time in our recent social history. With over 45s still clinging onto the DAB radio in the kitchen or bedroom, it’s inevitable that the family as a whole will hear Radio 2’s output and engage with it at some point during a typical week. For the eleventh survey in a row (almost three years in total) the station has delivered an audience of more than 15m per week. That’s 17% of all British radio consumption. Their listenership is down slightly quarter-on-quarter (only 200,000 listeners), which they often are during the spring and summer months, but they generally see come back strongly in Q4. During this survey period, many people moved to talk stations in the build-up to the Brexit vote and the station lost Tony Blackburn in the wake of the Savile inquiry, all of which may have played a small factor in the negligible fall.

6 Music’s audience is also now increasingly important to the music industry, as it rises again to its best ever figure, and we’ve witnessed many Top 20 albums debut this year, thanks to airplay and patronage from that one service alone. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, Prince died during this survey period of April 4 to June 23 and, in the same way that fans turned to the station to celebrate the work of David Bowie a few months earlier, it seems many of those people who stuck with the station and found it appealing have now had a fresh new batch move in to join them in the past three months as well. They’re the No.1 digital-only station yet again and remain the go-to destination for serious music fans.

As the UK population climbs, so too does our love for radio. Almost 50m people listen for at least 15 minutes per week (that’s the official definition, in case you’re wondering) and for 21.5 hours per week on average, a figure that’s fairly stayed consistent for some time now. Digital consumption is seeing new highs, as you might expect, with more commercial stations than ever before now meaning that they have the lead over the combined BBC radio network for the second-quarter in a row.

Many observers say we’re experiencing a golden age of radio in the UK. It’s great too that the best of it will be celebrated again with the birth of the ARIAs (the Radio Academy’s new awards coming this October at a ceremony in Leeds) and with next month’s Radio Festival in London for a second year running. We urge you to attend the excellent event at the British Library on September 26, as the great and the good turn out, chat and network on what’s been a tremendous year so far.