Q4 RAJAR – Local Commercial Stations (Subscribers)

In this quarter’s RAJAR data it is the local commercial radio stations which have staved off what could have been a poor showing by the commercial sector as whole. Where national commercial stations lost 4.9% of their weekly reach and their share of listening fell from 10.0% to 9.3%, the local stations pushed their reach up by 1.4% to 23.77 million listeners. Local commercial’s share of listening grew by 1.5% points year on year to 41% in Q4 1998.

The biggest success came from 100.7 Heart FM which gained 139,000 listeners (27.6%) year on year. Chrysalis Radio’s Galaxy stations also did very well: Galaxy 105 gained 126,000 listeners (30.4%), Galaxy 102.2 was up by 61,000 (43.6%) and Galaxy 102 gained 54,000 (23.7%).

At the other end of the scale Capital’s Gold local stations returned fairly poor results. Capital Gold Kent dropped 59,000 (45.7%) of listeners leaving an average weekly reach of 70,000. Capital Gold Sussex’s reach fell by 46,000 (37.4%) to 77,000 and Capital Gold Birmingham lost 30,000 listeners (15.2%) taking its average reach down to 168,000.

The top and bottom ten stations in terms of percentage change of weekly reach are also shown here:

Subscribers can access the Radio database by selecting “Radio” from the drop-down box at the top of this page.