Hurrah for RAJAR - though whether people will be saying that in the GCap board room today we're not sure. Yep, the quarterly radio listening figures are once again upon us, and it's not particularly good news for GCap's flagship London enterprise Capital FM.
Chrysalis owned Heart 106.2, itself subject to gloomy RAJARs earlier this year, has regained its status as the most popular commercial station in London. Not only that, but it has beaten Capital in terms of both numbers of listeners and share of the market - a double whammy never before achieved by any of Capital's competitors. And as if that wasn't enough doom and gloom for Capital bosses, EMAP owned Magic has also had a good quarter, boosting its number of listening hours by 4%, meaning that according to that measure Capital comes third in terms of commercial radio in London, behind both Heart and Magic.
Capital Radio's top guy, Keith Pringle, was quick to admit that the latest RAJAR stats are disappointing, but he blamed the station's current disappointing performance on mysterious "issues" which, he says, are being resolved as we speak. He told reporters: "It is a disappointing result, there's absolutely no question about that. But we were expecting this and have started to put a lot of work in place to solve these issues. We've had a [night] mare this time but we've seen our competitors fall behind and rebound within three months. I have a huge amount of confidence in the people here and we have a strong product."
On the upside for Capital, they still have the biggest commercial breakfast show in London, with Johnny Vaughan pulling in 893,000 listeners. That said, that's 184,000 down in the last quarter and, with the new Jamie Theakston show boosting Heart's breakfast audience to 883,000 and the Chris Moyles' breakfast show on Radio 1 now pulling in 895,000 listeners in London, even that isn't such good news.
Virgin Radio currently have the third biggest commercial breakfast show in London, with Pete & Geoff pulling in 648,000 listeners, up 127,000 from the same period last year, and more than their EMAP rivals - Magic getting 645,000 listeners, Kiss' breakfast audience down 165,000 to 505,000. The growing popularity of Pete & Geoff might make Virgin a bit nervous, given that the presenters will leave the show later this year. Though bosses at the station will take heart that their new breakfast guy, Christian O'Connell, has boosted his listener figures on Xfm breakfast to 349,000 in London and 399,000 nationally, his highest ever ratings.
Of course back at GCap, who also own Xfm, bosses will be hoping that that ratings boost was as much down to their marketing for the show as to the appeal of departing presenter O'Connell. Certainly Xfm had some impressive stats that were not dependent on their breakfast show host. The station reported record ratings in London of 628,000, up 56,000 year on year, while digital and satellite TV listeners helped boost the station's national listening figures to 760,000.
But while EMAP, Chrysalis, SMG, GCap et al all do battle over a few percentage points in London in a bid to justify their respective rate cards, everyone in commercial radio, and the advertising industry, knows that the real competitor in the world of radio is the BBC, and the new RAJARs again demonstrate how much that is true.
The Beeb has recorded its highest ever share of the radio market - up to 54.6% - which means, of course, more than half of the UK's radio listeners are out of the reach of advertisers. Between July and September the BBC maintained its overall audience of 32.8 million people, while the commercial sector collectively lost half a million listeners.
Within the BBC, more good news for Radio 1, who has put those listening figure woes of old well and truly behind it, with Chris Moyles' breakfast show helping the station to its highest share in over four years - 9.4%. Over at Radio 2 overall listening figures were down 200,000, but it maintains its status as the nation's favourite station with a 15.6% share, and Terry Wogan's breakfast show is still the most listened to breakfast show in the UK with 7.67 million listeners.
Radio 3 managed to push its audience back over the 2 million mark, mainly thanks to the always dependable Proms season, while Radio 4 increased both reach and share, and Radio 5 got its audience back up over 6 million. All of which is bad news for the commercial sector, who will presumably be more keen than ever to get moving with the idea of syndicating celeb packed shows on stations across the UK in order to compete with BBC heavyweights like Wogan, Chris Evans and Jonathan Ross.
Of course, let's not forget the RAJAR figures are kinda flawed in all sorts of ways and, where listening figures are close, any difference between stations could be written off with the statistical margin of error. But that doesn't stop the radio sector talking them up big time - though more so when the wobbly RAJAR stats go in their favour.