Stats galore in radio world, with the official listening figures - the RAJARS - for the first quarter of 2004 out yesterday.
First up, the much hyped battle of the breakfast shows. Good news for Radio 1 who saw some 700,000 new listeners choose their breakfast show since the arrival of Chris Moyles in the slot at the start of the year. Radio 1 bosses will be hoping the news will help combat increasing criticism of the station which has seen a general decline in audience in recent years as the music radio sector becomes increasingly competitive. Some might argue the considerable rise in early morning listeners since the start of the year says less about the popularity of Moyles and more about how dreadful its predecessor was (that being Sara Cox's long running breakfast show of course). However Radio 1 bosses will be hoping the ratings recovery acts as a sign that they are in control of the station, and is a starting point for more long term success.
In London the real breakfast show war began with the arrival of Johnny Vaughan at Capital - which happened after the period these ratings relate too. However some interesting reading all the same. Capital, who, like Radio 1, have seen audience share decline in recent years, enjoyed a boost in listeners at the start of the year as more people tuned in to hear the grand finale of the long long running Chris Tarrant breakfast show. Their audience share rose to 7.9%, mainly at the expense of arch rival Chrysalis owned Heart 106.2 who saw their breakfast audience share fall from a recent high of 7% to 5.8%. Capital boss David Mansfield said he was pleased with the rise in listeners at the start of the year, but recognised that the real battle had only just begun since the start of Vaughan's show. Chrysalis boss Richard Huntingford told reporters: "Even when we had that quarter where we overtook Capital we admitted that the real opportunity to take further share from Capital would be when Tarrant left."
To that end, the next set of RAJARs in July will be more interesting on the London breakfast show front. Not only are Heart hoping to steal some of the old Tarrant faithful to regain their 7% audience share, but EMAP owned Magic also reckon they are getting some of the old Capital listeners. EMAP radio boss Mark Story has told the Media Guardian: "We decided that Johnny's programme would be a little more laddish than Tarrant and the opportunity was the older [and female] end of the audience, who could decide to call it a day with Capital. Anecdotally we believe that is happening. The response seems to be that Johnny is a bit younger, but a bit laddish and not particularly good for women. We are happy with that."
Elsewhere, good news for talk radio. Chrysalis' London talk station LBC added another 124,000 listeners to its Nick Ferrari fronted breakfast show - the station as a whole increased market share from 1.8% to 3.4%. Meanwhile BBC Five Live's breakfast programme, fronted by Nicky Campbell, increased its audience by 350,000. The main loser in the talk radio field was Radio 4 whose Today programme saw a decline of listeners in the region of 150,000.
More on the RAJARs on Monday once the various radio PR machines have spun their take on their own stations' individual performance. Meanwhile one interesting stat from the latest figures - there has been a 50% increase in the number of people using their TVs to access radio. With all the multi-channel TV systems - including Freeview - offering a range of radio services, some 28.7% of adults now listen to radio that way - which is good news for digital radio stations who can vastly increase their audience reach this way.
One last RAJAR point - let's not forget how flawed all these stats are - margins of error are often so high they swallow up most of the key audience share distinctions.