Commercial Radio Share Drops To Below 50%

The latest Rajar figures to be released for Q4 1995 show that Commercial Radio’s share of listening has fallen below 50% to a 49.7% share, after two periods in 1995, Q2 and Q3 when it was above 50% for the first time. However, weekly reach, at 64% is higher than ever before; the previous best weekly reach was 61%, for Q3 1995.

In terms of share of listening, the best performing of the national commercial stations was Classic FM, the only station to improve its share from the last quarter; it rose to a 3% share. Classic FM is still the biggest national commercial station, with 4.659 million listeners; Atlantic 252, which has a smaller universe than the other nationals has a weekly reach of 4.5 million listeners. This is a drop of 25,000 listeners year on year for Classic, but an increase of 381,000 listeners year on year for Atlantic.

Talk Radio, despite ditching its ‘shock jock’ policy, is still losing audiences, with weekly reach down to 4% from 5% last quarter, (1,993,000 listeners compared to over 2.2 million listeners last quarter.) Virgin 1215 AM’s weekly reach fell considerably from last year’s Q4 data; down from 9% reach (3,993,000 listeners) to 7% (3,377,000 listeners). Virgin 1215 does however, have the most hours spent listening (per listener) of all the nationals, 7.4 hours; Classic FM actually has the least, at 5.7 hours per listener.