It must be good to be Neil Fox this morning. For years he fronted the Capital Radio drivetime show on the assumption that when Chris Tarrant finally decided he'd had enough of early mornings that he, Dr Fox, would be handed London's biggest breakfast show. But then Capital bosses brought in Johnny Vaughan and slowly sidelined Foxy. So he quit, took on the prime time slot at EMAP owned rival Magic and, as of yesterday, is now officially presenting London's biggest breakfast show. Ah, what a nice story. Quick, secure the film rights.
Yes, Magic's breakfast show is the biggest in London, if the slightly made up radio ratings the RAJARs are to be believed. The Neil Fox show beat both Capital's Johnny Vaughan breakfast and Heart's Jamie Theakston/Harriet Scott breakfast affair to take the accolade. That helped Tragic FM maintain its title as London's most listened to radio station for the third quarter running. Well done them. And now, classic Daniel Bedingfield.
It should be noted that [a] Capital were actually right to not give Fox their breakfast show even if it means losing out to a rival in the ratings, [b] Capital claim that if you actually take Vaughan's new time slot into account (6.30am-10am) he still has the biggest overall breakfast audience, and [c] Capital actually enjoyed better RAJARs than of late with overall listening figures up on both the last quarter and the same quarter last year, something which helped them reclaim third place in the London radio market off Magic's youth focused sister station Kiss.
Elsewhere in RAJAR land, Capital's sister station Choice saw its audience rise from 500,000 last quarter to 611,000. Across the building, Xfm London saw its audience fall quarter on quarter, though it was still up slightly year on year - audience share, though, was down from 2% to 1.2%, which will possibly worry bosses there. Also down in the London market was Global Radio's talk station LBC, which was down both quarterly and year on year, albeit only slightly.
The big ratings battle in the radio world though is between commercial and BBC. In that domain there was good news for the Beeb who slightly extended its lead over commercial radio. That said, there were rating declines quarter on quarter at most BBC national stations. Radios 1, 2, 4 and 5Live all saw audience figures drop - 5Live in particular, which scored its lowest audience figures in seven years. Radio 3 saw its audience rise compared to last quarter - though last quarter was especially disappointing for the classical station, and their ratings are still down year on year. In the world of BBC breakfast shows, both Chris Moyles at Radio 1 and Terry Wogan at Radio 2 saw their audiences fall a little - the former more so, meaning Wogan increased his lead on Moyles.
The other big story in this set of RAJARs was the continued growth of digital radio - something that will please both the commercial sector and the BBC, who have both invested a lot in getting the digital domain off the ground. Nearly 30% of people now tune in to digital radio each week (via either a DAB radio, digital TV or the net) and digital now accounts for 15% of all radio listening.
In the digital domain the commercial stations lead, in particular EMAP's The Hits and Smash Hits which dominate in terms of listeners, with 1.49 million and 990,000 weekly listeners respectively. GCap's Planet Rock is third in the digital music station stakes with 548,000 listeners, ahead of the BBC's 6Music, which has 485,000. The biggest BBC digital offering is spoken word station BBC7 which had 795,000 listeners in the last quarter.