As Rajar publishes its second quarter results for the radio market, Newsline hears from Carat’s Michael Williamson on what he makes of the latest figures.
The new Radio Joint Audience Research (RAJAR) findings have just been released, and amongst all the data there were three key findings that caught my eye.
Firstly, the stand out success story is Kiss radio, who achieved fantastic year-on-year listening figures. Secondly, London listening in general seems to have been re-energised. And finally, the results illustrate the continuing growth of digital only stations.
This quarter Kiss were the big commercial winner as their stations collectively rose above 5 million weekly listeners for the first time. Their sub brands fared well too. Kisstory figures rose 33% to achieve 1.5 million weekly listeners.
Kiss Fresh was up 19% year-on-year. And Kiss London is up 14% year-on-year to 2.1 million weekly listeners (a close second place to Capital who achieved 2.2 million). Overall, Kiss is definitely a main player now rather than a challenger brand.
But Kiss wasn’t an anomaly. All the top London stations performed well. In fact, Capital, Kiss, Magic and Heart all did well with a spread of just 215,000 listeners between them. There is healthy competition between these top four – something that can only be good both for listeners and advertisers in London.
Meanwhile, digital only stations continue to grow. Besides the Kiss properties mentioned above, Absolute 80s was up 29% year-on-year to 1.6 million weekly listeners, and Capital Xtra rose 13.5% to achieve 951,000. This continued adoption bodes well for the launch of the second digital multiplex happening next year, a project backed by Bauer and TalkSport.
The new multiplex will give digital stations like Absolute 80s and Kisstory a bigger platform and will bring in extra listeners. It will also feature brand new sister stations such as TalkSport 2 and Mellow Magic.
We expect these to prove popular with listeners.
Michael Williamson is head of AV planning at Carat.
