Sore but happy heads over at talkSPORT…

Helen Keable, investment director at Manning Gottlieb OMD, on the latest RAJAR release for Q4 2010…

Digital has emerged as the star of today’s RAJAR results with almost 4 million more people tuning in via DAB than this time last year – a really promising step in the right direction for switch-over.

Otherwise it has proven to be a roller-coaster ride for the Nationals with lots of sore but happy heads over at talkSPORT compared to a fairly subdued atmosphere I imagine in Golden Square…

There’s no doubt that talkSPORT’s success is well deserved and it sends a strong message to the market that investment in content does pay off, but at the same time you could almost hear the collectively empathetic sigh as Absolute posted their losses for Q4.

The numbers, reflecting the station’s performance two years down the line from the Virgin Radio re-brand, have come as a huge disappointment not least because of the great results they posted last quarter when it seemed that they may finally have turned a corner.

Absolute seems to be getting it so right with their recent brand extensions such as Absolute 80s and 90s yet somehow not so with the flagship station where despite a solid music policy and Christian still pulling in listeners at breakfast they can’t stem audience losses, particularly in London.

Overall, Q4 looks to have been a bumper quarter for sports stations with both Five Live and talkSPORT reporting excellent results – it will be interesting to see whether this is a positive legacy of last summer’s World Cup coverage and how permanent that may be.

Bauer seems to have bucked the trend of a generally sticky RAJAR for London with good news stories at both ends of the spectrum. It’s quite a coup for Kiss to leap-frog Heart to become the third biggest commercial music station in London and to beat BBC Radio 1. Meanwhile Magic stays in at no.1 in London on every count, even keeping Radio 2 in second place.