
A double day for radio news as the winners of the UK’s radio awards – the ARIAS – coincide with the release of Q1/25 of the radio ratings. Both are covered on my podcast – The Media Club – with a bumper episode out later today.
Congratulations to BBC Radio 3 for being Station of the Year, Forth One for winning Best Local Radio Station and Goalhanger for becoming Audio Brand of the Year.
The UK radio industry is in a unique position as radio sectors go. It’s a very consolidated marketplace, with the ‘big three’ – the BBC, Bauer and Global now accounting for 86.9% of the UK radio market. It’s also incredibly multi-platform too. 73.3% of radio is now listened to ‘digitally’ – with 42.1% being through DAB and 28.5% being streamed – both much bigger than analogue’s 26.7% share of the market.
But the nature of the sector makes me think a lot about how to measure radio success today.
I’m very much struck listening to Melbourne’s Radio Wars – an excellent podcast that looks at Australian radio, with a focus on a breakfast battle in Melbourne. It shows how local shows are competing against a beamed in national show – that of Kyle & Jackie O. This is with a backdrop of their main radio groups moving towards much more national programming, but a seeming over-reliance on FM (and AM) signals. For a market that’s so creatively ahead, it seems strategically and structurally to have one foot in the past.
The idea of a battle for a single city’s ratings is a discussion that’s long gone here in the UK. Even the idea of winning the London breakfast battle seems a bygone concept as our London breakfast shows are now often the basis for national operations.
For the UK commercial radio groups, it’s the ‘network’ totals that are more important than the station ones. And networks aren’t just the same station in different places, it’s the collection of spin-offs that orbit the hero brand. These networks are sold to advertisers. You’re not buying Heart, you’re buying the Heart Network, with impacts delivered on Heart Musicals and 80s as well as what’s going out on 106.2 in London.
The battle between Global and Bauer is over who can deliver the most hours to the agencies and be must-have on schedules. A decline in the local hours because of networking, is often more than made up in new audiences on spin-offs, whilst at the same time banking significant cost savings from closing buildings and employing fewer people.
The net result is very little changes to total audiences – 87% of the country listen to some form of live every week for an average of 20 hours. Additionally the profitability of UK radio groups, seems pretty strong.
The spin-off stations have supercharged commercial radio against the BBC, moving commercial radio’s share of all listening to 54.9% and its share of 15 to 44s to 67.4%. Even for 45+, traditionally a BBC heartland, commercial radio and the BBC are now neck and neck, both at 49.3%.
The issue with the spin-off stations is whether they’re just a sugar hit? Can the networks grow the relevance of some of these individual parts to make material differences to their network (and not just to off-set declines in the heritage parts).
The chart below shows this quarter’s total hours alongside last quarter’s and a year ago for some of the main networks. There’s a lot of flat stations and some with precipitous declines. Now this is part of the problem of increased competition. You need to work harder to maintain your audience, let alone grow it. Also, some demos (the young) are harder to deal with than others.

The growth around Global’s Heart has been impressive, as is Capital’s performance, Smooth has seen solid progress too. It’s early days for Classic’s new spin-offs to reenforce its brand whilst LBC and Radio X are broadly going in the right direction.
Bauer’s GHR is up and Absolute is flat-ish, the rest has seen significant hours erosion. This survey is before GHR 70s and 80s and Hits 90s and 00s hit the airwaves – it will be interesting to see what affect they have. For Hits the question is whether it will offset any churn following the de-localisation of their historic FM network at roughly the same time.
Over at News UK, record performance for talkSPORT and talkSPORT2 has helped drive the ‘talk’ network, offsetting underperformance from Talk Radio.
The Virgin Radio network finishes 12 months under 10m hours, seeing a large year on year decline. Indeed its total hours are now just a smidgen ahead of independent oldies station Boom Radio which generated a phenomenal 9.5m hours. I would imagine the cost per listener difference between Virgin and Boom is significant.
For networks that are under-performing I think Boom is a good lesson. It has an audience focus, creative programmers and is hungry for success. It also spends a decent proportion of its income on marketing – which is relatively invisible if you’re under 65. It doesn’t RAJAR its two spin-offs, I’m interested to see what it does with them now that the challenge it faced from Radio 2 Extra has been seen off.
I think there is a question whether there are too many spin offs and not enough programmers. Are the stations a little threadbare to deliver the next wave of audience growth? Has a lack of marketing and investment harmed some of the parent brands, making it even more difficult to (re)-grow audiences? And where are the ideas that can drive new station formats that can generate 10m hours? Why’s that being left to the independents.
Global and Bauer have done a good job of grabbing the low hanging fruit, whilst definitely catering for some unmet audience need. They’ve been able to do this whilst the BBC has been somewhat stymied from competing in the same space. We’ll see if Radio 1 Anthems, Dance and Radio 3 Unwind redress some of the balance. However for the battling commercial groups – the real opportunity is surely trying to ‘do a Boom’ – devising something new that has real resonance (and hours) rather that just try to defend heritage brands with more of the same.
If you’re after a more detailed line-by-line interrogation of the figures, Adam Bowie’s done a great job here. Check out Radio Today’s coverage here.
The excellent Octagon from Hallett Arendt helps me process RAJAR numbers – they can help you too!