Rajar Q4 2013: National stations and networks

Total Global Radio UK has maintained its dominance over the national stations and networks, despite dropping its weekly reach by -2.2% on the previous quarter.

The latest Rajar results for the final quarter of 2013 reveal the network’s reach stood at an impressive 19.9 million and was up 3.6% year on year.

BBC Radio 2 held on to its second place position with a little over 15.5 million weekly listeners, up 3.9% on the third quarter and up 2.7% year on year.

Bauer Radio Total Portfolio also continues to perform well, up 1% on Q3 and up 8.8% on last year. With a weekly reach of more than 14.4 million listeners, the network was up 150,000 on the last period.

After a small decline in performance for BBC Radio 1 in the third quarter, the station was up 1.3 – with a reach close to 11 million each week – but was down -1.1% YoY.

A success story in the Q3 results, BBC’s Five Live Sports Extra dropped -41.6% in the final quarter to settle for 889,000 weekly listeners – a drop of 633,000. Despite the drop, the station was still up a healthy 5% YoY.

Good news for BBC 6 Music which was up a healthy 13.3% on the third quarter – bagging almost two million weekly listeners. The digital-only station also saw year on year growth of 3.8%.

It was also good news for Kiss UK, with the Bauer network seeing a 18.1% YoY increase – maintaining its five million weekly reach for two consecutive quarters.

Total Absolute Radio Network, was up 4.6% in Q4 – and 7.5% over the year to reach more than 3.5 million listeners.

TalkSPORT also made positive gains – up 7.4% in Q4 and up 5.9% YoY taking its reach to a yearly high of more than 3.2 million. Good news too for Classic FM – with the station enjoying 5.9% growth in the winter period to record more than 5.6 million listeners.

After a wobble in the third quarter, Total Absolute Radio Network also saw modest growth to reach a little over 3.5 million listeners each week (up 4.6% this quarter and up 7.5% YoY).

A rebrand for Bauer’s Smash Hits to Kiss Fresh has, so far, not worked quite so well, with the station dropping its reach by -61% over the year. The station was down -56.4% on the previous quarter to secure just 387,000 listeners each week.

The top spots for share of listening belonged mainly to the BBC, with a 0.7 percentage point QoQ increase bringing up Radio 2’s total share to 17.6%.

Total Global Radio (UK) followed with 15.3%, with BBC Radio 4 (including 4 Extra) once again claiming the third spot with 13.5%.

All quarterly increases and decreases were marginal, with the greatest drop in share belonging to Total Global Radio at -0.8 percentage points, and the greatest increase belonging to Radio 2.

The final quarter of 2013 revealed mixed results for radio stations across the nation, with just over a third reporting any increases in weekly listening hours – though the majority of these were marginal.

For a second consecutive period, BBC Radio 4 (including 4 Extra), Radio 2 and Radio 4 secured the top three spots – the only stations to record an average listening time over 11 hours, with Radio 4 surpassing the 12 hour mark for the first time since March 2013.

Despite recording slight quarter on quarter losses, Global Radio’s commercial networks, Total LBC (UK) (-1%), Gold Network (UK) (-1.2%) and Total Global Radio (UK) (-2.5%) managed to keep listeners tuning in for an average of 8 hours or more.

The biggest quarterly increases belonged to stations from Bauer portfolio, with Kisstory up 12.8% (4.4 hours), Kiss Fresh up 18.5% (3.2 hours) and The Hits up 35.5% (4.2 hours).