OK, it was another RAJAR Thursday yesterday, so let's speed through the top line figures from the quarterly radio industry ratings report shall we?
First up, some good news for the long since flagging Capital FM, which finally regained the crown for biggest commercial radio breakfast show in London. Capital's Johnny Vaughan fronted show has never managed the lead his predecessor Chris Tarrant enjoyed in the breakfast show market, normally losing out to competition from Jamie Theakston at Heart and Neil Fox at Magic.
But this quarter, despite the embarrassment of the much hyped on air reunion of Vaughan and former Big Breakfast co-host Denise Van Outen finishing six months early, and even though actually the show's listening figures are down year on year, the Capital breakfast show returned to the number one in London spot. So, celebratory croissants all round I say.
Magic, who had the number one London breakfast show in recent RAJAR surveys, held on to the title of biggest commercial station in London, though only just because Capital enjoyed some audience gains across the board while the Bauer owned Magic station saw both listener numbers and audience share drop a little.
Elsewhere in RAJARville, the BBC continues to lead over commercial radio, mainly thanks to the multi-million figure audiences pulled in by big name presenters on the national Beeb stations, like Terry Wogan on Radio 2 and Chris Moyles on Radio 1. Radio 2 remains the UK's biggest station by some distance, with the commercial national stations seeing their audience figures either fall - in the case of Virgin Radio and Classic FM - or stay pretty much the same - in the case of TalkSport.
The commercial radio sector, though, would presumably like me to point out that the BBC's lead over commercial stations in terms of audience share is down from to 55.5% to 54.9%, and that the commercial sector did particularly well in the local radio space. Andrew Harrison from commercial radio body Radiocentre told reporters: "We have seen some very encouraging results for the commercial radio sector and it is particularly pleasing to see us once again regaining some market share - adding two percentage points across the last two quarters. Local commercial radio in particular has had a really strong quarter; this is the second set of results that we have had released since the relaxed regulation for local stations and it is good to see this having a continued positive effect, this confirms yet again that our stations know what they are doing in serving their local audience".
Finally, how is that new fangled digital radio doing? Well, despite many of the major radio companies dropping their digital only services, and the future of DAB looking a bit dodgy following Channel 4's complete withdrawal from the broadcasting medium, digital radio listening continues to rise, with digital services accounting for 18.7% of all radio listening in the last quarter, up from 17.9% last quarter and 15% the quarter before.
Of course, a lot of digital listening is for services available via analogue radio too - ie people are buying digital radio sets and then using them to tune into Radio 1 or Classic FM rather than 1Xtra or Jazz FM. That said, 1Xtra saw the biggest increase in audience size in the digital sector, up 42%, while other BBC digital services Radio 7 and Five Live Sports Extra also saw their listening figures go up. 6Music's listening figures were pretty much the same as before, while the BBC Asian Network saw its listening figures fall.
In the commercial sector, ironically one of the stations which one of the aforementioned big radio companies axed, Planet Rock, saw its audience grow 16% year on year, which is good news for its new independent owners. Other commercial digital services with a boost in ratings included Virgin Classic Rock (now Absolute Classic Rock), The Arrow and The Hits.
The new RAJARs also included the first set of ratings for new digital service NME Radio, which scored an average weekly reach of 215,000 listeners, a figure which the new station seems happy with. NME Radio MD Sammy Jacob told CMU: "This is a great result for us at this stage of our launch programme. We are targeting platforms that are right for our audience, we're delivering the bands and artists they love and we'll continue to innovate in terms of programming and delivery of creative solutions for our commercial partners".
NME Publishing Director Paul Cheal added: "It's been a fantastic year for the NME brand, picking up a number of awards across our platforms. This result for NME Radio strengthens our position as a truly multi-platform brand and plays a vital part in NME increasing its reach which is already over one million music fans every week".