The boss of a smaller Leicester based radio station targeted at the city's Asian community has been talking to the Media Guardian about his station's big success in the last set of Rajars, which saw them edge ahead of both their local BBC and commercial pop rivals in terms of overall audience share. Within the urban catchment area of Leicester, Sabras Radio has managed to edge ahead with a 17.2% share of listening, compared with GWR owned Leicester Sound's 16% share and BBC Radio Leicester's 14% share.
The stations MD and founder Don Kotak called the figures "an amazing breakthrough", admitting that a high level of interest among British Asians in the current political climate has contributed to the station's record figures. "The political situation has created more interest although we don't do a lot of news and heated discussions. We cover politics as news only, and deliberately avoid getting involved in discussions that become fragmented and allow the same few fundamentalist guys from each religion to go on about the same thing."
Kotak feels his policy of having a healthy amount of English language programming, and English music, in his schedules has helped to win members of the young Asian community who wouldn’t listen to the station if it was too 'ghettoised'.
The success in overall audience share was achieved not through having the biggest number of listeners, but through having a dedicated listener base who on average listen to twice as many hours of the station’s output every week than Leicester Sound listeners.
There was good news for the London based Asian station Sunrise Radio in the last set of Rajars too - it increased its audience share from 1.7% to 2.4%.