Changing Listener Behaviour - RAJAR Q4/2024

What the UK Radio Ratings Tell us About Listeners

RAJAR, UK radio’s audience figures are out, and as always it’s great to see a snapshot of how stations are performing, but also it’s good to note the changes in listener behaviour.

Whether you’re in radio, music or podcasting, we can never forget that we’re in the audiences business. Public service, commercial or doing it for fun - our focus surely has to be on delivering value for the people that consume our and our colleagues’ work.

UK radio has been on a long march to consolidation in ownership alongside an explosion in new stations driven by the growth in listening to DAB Digital Radio and streaming. Analogue listening (AM/FM) now only accounts for 27.8% of radio’s consumption here. Indeed, streaming radio is neck and neck with analogue (with a 27.0% share). Listening on a DAB Digital Radio leads the pack, 35.9m radio listeners tune in that way, and it accounts for 42.7% of listening.

This change in behaviour has led commercial radio’s big groups - Bauer and Global - to really jump on station expansion, particularly spin-offs from their existing brands. This quarter sees at least 10 new stations publish figures for the first time, including Greatest Hits Radio 60s (with 386k listeners) and Heart Love (201k).

This has had a significant affect on the BBC. In the last ten years, the BBC has gone from reaching 65% of the UK through radio to 55%, its share of listening has been similarly affected dropping from 54% to 44%. The corporation is trying to fight back, pushing to launch spin-offs like Radio 1 Anthems, Radio 1 Dance, Radio 3 Unwind and a Radio 2 oldies station on DAB. They’re currently stuck in the regulatory quagmire.

What’s interesting with the BBC proposals is they’ve identified that to be successful with audiences who don’t use the BBC, they have to ape commercial radio’s model - less speech and more niched opportunities.

They’re right in their analysis, though I’m not sure it’s the best argument for a public broadcaster.

Radio isn’t a one-size fits all medium. People listen for lots of different reasons, in different places and catering for many different need states. Historically, the market was made up of music-intensive stations (like Absolute 80s), music and chat services (eg Radio 2 and local radio) and all speech stations (like Radio 4).

I think we’ve definitely seen a switch to much more focused music products - Heart (best ever reach of 10m), Smooth (2nd best ever numbers at 6.5m), GHR (biggest commercial station by hours) all have very low speech content (and have replaced stations that were a little more chatty) and at the same time there’s been an explosion in speech services - the expansion of LBC (in this book, Nick Ferrari celebrated his highest ever numbers at 1.5m), Times Radio (up 23% this quarter to 604k listeners), talkRADIO etc. Trying to be successful and broad is more difficult as there’s often a station to scratch a particular itch right now. We no longer need to pick ‘the least worst option’.

BBC Radio 2 remains the country’s most popular station with 13.6m listeners (up year on year and quarter on quarter), but someway below the 15.5m it was doing ten years ago. BBC Radio 1 is down to 7.5m (from 8.1m last quarter, and slightly up year it on year) though it was doing 10.5m ten years ago.

There’s often a cry about younger listeners abandoning radio, well since RAJAR started up again post-pandemic (Q3/21), reach for 15 to 19s is up from 2.1m to 2.4m and 20 to 24s from 3.7m to 3.8m. Even if that just tracks with population increases - it’s not bad. How much are they listening? Well, that’s not bad either. For 15 to 19s, the amount’s grown from 23.6m hours to 24.6m for the older 20 to 24s - it’s gone down from 44.3m to 40.5m, but if I looked at last quarter, that was 46.6m - so it’s basically static.

The challenge for younger listeners isn’t radio’s decline - it’s that they’re pulled lots of different ways. Algorithmically-led music taste (driven by apps like TikTok) means trying to be everything to everyone is very difficult.

Commercial network Kiss is clearly grappling with these changes too. It’s main station (shorn of it’s FM frequencies in London and beyond) drops to 1.08m listeners (down from 1.6m quarter on quarter and 2.3m year on year). This sounds pretty dire until you see that its new Kiss Dance spin off racked up 720k listeners, alongside 190k for Fresh, 2.1m for Kisstory and 530k for the new Kisstory RnB. I think it’s a fascinating challenge to think of what the Kiss ‘brand’ is now.

The consolidation of stations has been aided by government regulation, with the latest Media Act removing local programming requirements. Global have chosen to create versions of Heart, Smooth and Capital for England, Scotland and Wales resulting in the loss of many jobs.

If you look at Heart, all but one of the regions grew the audience of their local drive-time shows, year on year. This was not an under-performing bunch of people. Indeed Heart South’s Rich Clarke added 120k hours in a 6.2m TSA and Heart West’s Ben Atkinson added 160k hours in a 4m TSA. Meanwhile in London there was just 62k growth for their drivetime show in a 12.7m TSA.

The cost savings from the local teams will be significant, but shutting buildings will save even more money. According to Radio Today, Global’s sites at Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, Wrexham, Milton Keynes and Fareham will all close.

The Heart Network - the main Heart made up of all of these regions/nations generates 58m hours, its spin-off stations like Heart 80s and Heart Musicals collectively generate 23.2m hours - with significantly less investment and resource. These spin-offs may currently generate half the hours of the Network, but I’d imagine at significantly less than half the cost.

The BBC has an excellent opportunity to benefit from the removal of lots of local brands, but its efforts at BBC Local Radio have not been particularly successful. A small glimmer of hope for them this quarter is their ‘Local Radio in England’ total has, year on year, plateaued at 4.8m. In the last 10 years its audience has dropped 30% and the hours of listening its delivered are now down 40%. It has a lot to try and recover.

Australia

It’s interesting to compare the UK with Australia. They’re going through a similar transformation with many regional and capital city stations now under the Hits or Triple M banners, Nova in all the capital cities as they’ve always been and ARN looking at bringing together their capital city stations under a KIIS or Gold banner.

ARN recently signed a ten year $20m/year deal (that’s £10m/year in UK money) with their Sydney breakfast talent Kyle and Jackie O. They added them to Melbourne with a view to taking them to the other capital cities. Melbourne has not gone particularly well (do check out the excellent Melbourne Radio Wars podcast to keep track of the shenanigans), putting the move to any others on hold.

One of the challenges for ARN is that KIIS (and some differently named stations in the same KIIS network) when executed locally have a different music mix and feel. The lack of harmonisation and extreme nature of K&J content (that Sydney are used to and no one else is) has made it difficult for ARN to make their strategy work. And it has to. They’re on the line for $200m that they’ve promised to K&J.

Had this been the UK, the option would have been to create a new station for the show on DAB outside of Sydney (similar to what we did with Chris Moyles on Radio X). Australian DAB is actually pretty successful, but it lacks the focus and understanding of the radio groups. The importance of their historic analogue stations has left the groups unable to be as fleet of foot as their UK counterparts. Even today they could add the Sydney KIIS as ‘KIIS’ outside of Melbourne and Brisbane and start to build a nationwide K&J home. It need not get in the way of future changes to FM stations, but it would at least give them a run up.

Back to the UK

With previously local networks, spin-offs and new stations it can be hard to see who’s the biggest. If we look at stations/networks over 1m listeners, here’s the table based on total number of listeners (that’s reach or cume):

It makes BBC Radio 2 the biggest station, and Heart the biggest commercial radio station.

If you look at listening (hours or share) then BBC Radio 2 is still the biggest station, and Greatest Hits Radio is the biggest commercial station.

Radio 1, despite its bad book, is bigger than Capital, Capital Dance and Capital Xtra are bigger than Kiss, though Kisstory is bigger than all of them. Heart 80s is the number one eighties station, as it’s bigger than Absolute 80s, meanwhile Radio X and Absolute Radio are neck and neck.

If you want more RAJAR chat (AND WHO DOESN’T!), then Adam Bowie (who also writes a blog post about RAJAR) is joining me on The Media Club podcast this week. It’s out on Friday, so why not follow it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts in preparation. Also joining us on the show is audio fan, and PR supremo, Megan Carver.

For more RAJAR detail, Radio Today is also a good place to look. And, if you’ve been forwarded this by a friend or colleague, why not subscribe!

Thanks to Hallett Arendt who’s excellent Octagon software allows me to analyse RAJAR data so quickly.