In the quarter that saw 6 Music as the radio home of Glastonbury Festival as well as its Loud and Proud season, there was a record weekly reach of 2.85 million for Radio 6 Music – with a record 1.49 million tuning in for the Breakfast Show with Lauren Laverne (highest since the new RAJAR methodology began).
Another digital station, Radio 5 Sports Extra, also attracted a huge weekly audience with 1.43 million listening for the Premier League coverage, plenty of cricket, golf, Six Nations and much more.
The RAJAR figures for Quarter 2 (4 April – 26 June 2022) continue to highlight how audiences value BBC Radio with 33 million people tuning in each week for live output across the stations, with a share of 48.1%.
During the same quarter on BBC Sounds, there was a record number of weekly users – 4.3 million – as well as 177 million plays of our podcasts and on-demand radio programmes, and 3 million plays of our music mixes. On third party platforms, there were 264 million downloads of BBC podcasts and on-demand radio programmes across the world.
Charlotte Moore, BBC Chief Content Officer, said: “It’s wonderful to see again the special place 6 Music and Lauren’s show has for loyal listeners. Whether it’s music or sport, we know how much these digital stations mean to their audiences, whilst millions of people listen across our live networks for the company and quality of all our brilliant presenters and programming. We’re also seeing more people listen to audio on BBC Sounds, as listening habits continue to change and audiences are increasingly enjoying our podcasts and other on-demand audio.”
According to RAJARs, BBC Radio 1 had 7.98m listeners aged 10+ and the Radio 1 Breakfast Show with Greg James (Mon-Fri) had 4.47m 10+ listeners.
BBC Radio 2 had 14.53m listeners with 7.27m tuning in for The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show.
BBC Radio 3 had 2.02m listeners.
BBC Radio 4 had 10.3m listeners with 6.59m tuning in for The Today programme (Mon-Sat).
BBC Radio 5 Live posted a reach of 5.12m listeners.
BBC Radio 1Xtra had 749k listeners, BBC Radio 4 Extra had 1.89m, BBC 5 Sports Extra had 1.43m, and BBC Asian Network had 473k.
The BBC World Service was listened to by 1.41m people, and BBC Nations radio and Local BBC Radio in England had a combined audience of 7.67m.
RAJAR was suspended from March 2020 after Coronavirus restrictions forced all face-to-face market research to be suspended. The revised approach, starting with Q3 2021 data, includes new ways to capture data, providing greater stability and security for the future. The new, revised approach sees the existing survey design adapted to broaden its data gathering sources with the inclusion of panellist and MediaCell technology for the first time, alongside face-to-face recruited respondents; capturing listening both from diaries and by means of audio matching technology on the respondents’ mobile devices. MediaCell is proprietary passive technology owned by Ipsos MORI which runs as an application on a smartphone. It identifies listening to radio stations by Audio Content Recognition (ACR) techniques.
Source
BBC Radio 6 Music
