Good news over at both Radio 1 and Radio 2 RAJARS wise, as the latest set of the always dubious radio listening figures were released yesterday.
First up, Radio 1 saw its audience rise by 700,000 to 10.4 million, while Chris Moyles continued to enjoy success with 470,000 more people tuning in to his breakfast show in the last quarter, taking his audience up to 6.79 million. At Radio 2 both Terry Wogan and Ken Bruce enjoyed audience increases, while the station's overall audience went up to 13.29 million. And even the new Chris Evans drive time show, a controversial new programme that proved unpopular with some of his predecessor Johnnie Walker's listeners, managed to maintain respectable listening figures. While he was down 150,000 on Walker's final RAJAR, his figures compared well with those of the same quarter last year.
In London, less happy faces around Capital Radio, presumably, where London's once flagship commercial station recorded its lowest ever audience and audience share, with the breakfast show also hitting an all time low - and all this despite the recent revamp. The only up was that Johnny Vaughan does still host the biggest breakfast show on commercial radio in London - scoring 852,000, ahead of Heart 106.2's Jamie Theakston who has 820,000 listeners and Magic's Neil Fox who has 803,000. All three major London breakfast shows lost listeners in the last quarter, in fact, possibly feeding the rise in listeners over at Radios 1 and 2.
Not that anyone at EMAP will care about Fox losing a few listeners on breakfast - they'll be too busy celebrating the fact that cheesy listening station Magic was the biggest station in terms of reach and audience share for the second quarter running, with Chrysalis' Heart 106.2 in second place, and Capital in third.
Commenting on the results, GCap said that they were not surprised, and that the decline in the station's success had been happening over a long time, and therefore their recent revamp, designed to changed the station's fortunes, would take longer than six months to show results. With that in mind GCap said they remained optimistic about the future of the station, though that didn't stop their share price taking a hit after the RAJARS were released.
Anyway, enough RAJAR for now, perhaps we'll return to specialist and regional RAJAR stats on Monday. Though I think we said that the last time radio listening figures were out, and then we never did.