While having more listeners is a great claim to have, the sales team will be rubbing their hands with glee at being London’s commercial number one.

Clearly you don’t get hours without reach in the first place, but while the AutoTune-tasticness of the station completely escapes me, somebody is definitely listening!

In terms of reach – the number of people listening (“…for at least 5 minutes in the course of an average week”) – Magic (2,009,000) and Heart (1,893,000) still have more listeners than Capital (1,818,000). Yet in terms of market share, Capital is just ahead of Magic, while LBC 97.3 comes in third place among London’s commercial stations.

In a major radio market such as London, with a relatively large number of stations jostling for position, market share becomes much more important – especially for advertisers.

As for Capital’s past decline some might say “dubious programming choices” is a polite way of putting it. In particular the period when Capital swung between trying to be “Kiss 95.8″ in order to regain lost younger listeners, and then went the other way to take-on Heart – who, in turn, were trying to be “Capital Lite” – didn’t do the station any favours.

Many (older) Capital fans look back to how they remember the station in the early-90s with a certain amount of affection and dewy-eyed nostalgia. Admittedly I’m biased because I was part of the team that helped make it happen at the time, and it did sound great, but I’m not one of those who believed turning back the clock was the answer.

It’s too easy to forget that, back then, Capital had the mass London radio audience to itself and much has changed since then; not just more stations, such as Heart, as well as the transformation of Melody into Magic, but also the gradual evolution of Radio 2 into its current position as the nation’s most-popular station.

What I’ve found interesting has been the way Magic grew slowly and quietly by re-defining its focus and appealing to a younger audience than its predecessor. Once anybody at Capital realised what was happening – because they were looking too closely at Kiss and Heart it was too late and Capital lost its crown.

Finally, a blatant plug. To see how the London stations have performed through the day see http://pauleaston.blogspot.com/2009/10/london-rajar-q32009.html