Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for another CMU RAJAR round up - oh, we're too kind to you all, we really are. Yep, the latest round of radio listening figures were announced yesterday so, with the usual health warning of just how dodgy these stats can be, let's have a quick run through them.
Starting with our good friends over there at Xfm, who are having a rather good time of it. The lovely Lauren Laverne, in particular, is proving that women don't have to be confined to reading the weather when it comes to the world of London breakfast shows. She added 24% to her audience in the last quarter, and now enjoys 340,000 weekly listeners, just 9000 off the biggest audience ever reached by the Christian O'Connell enterprise she replaced. GCap owned Xfm fared well over all, pulling in 622,000 listeners - a whole 125,000 more than the last quarter - and its second highest reach ever. Well done them.
On Laverne's achievements, The Guardian quote Xfm PD Andy Ashton thus: "Lauren has worked tirelessly to deliver an energetic and fresh new look to Xfm breakfast and London breakfast radio in general. She is absolutely unique and I am confident that this is only the start of her impact on the London breakfast radio market".
Elsewhere in the London breakfast show wars, Capital's Johnny Vaughan stayed ahead over all with 963,000 listeners, while Heart's Jamie Theakston pulled in 855,000 and Neil Fox, newly installed on Magic's London breakfast slot, got 804,000 - an 18% increase on the quarter. Radio 1's Chris Moyles saw his London audience fall, as did former Xfm now Virgin Radio breakfast man Christian O'Connell, though he did add 46,000 listeners nationwide, so presumably that will keep his bosses happy. The now departed Kiss breakfast show host Bam Bam saw his audience fall by 4% on the quarter, which may have, in part, led to that departure ahead of the promised Kiss revamp - who knows?
EMAP will be hoping that the Kiss revamp works because in the last quarter its audience declined from 1.43 million to 1.28 million, which still puts it way ahead of many of the other niche stations, but not as far ahead as EMAP will want it to be. Not that the EMAP top guard are probably too bothered this week, because presumably they are too busy celebrating the fact that they own what is now the biggest commercial radio station in London. Yep, as bizarre as it seems, in the last quarter, cheesy-listening Magic was a bigger station than both Capital FM and Heart 106.2. Its weekly audience went up from 1.67 million to 1.86 million, while its audience share was boosted from 4.9% to 7%. Of course the man behind this surge is Magic PD Richard Park - a former Capital Radio programme director who always seemed to understand what the London radio listeners wanted - even if what they wanted was radio trash.
Capital and Heart sit behind Magic, the former in second place in terms of audience size, the latter in terms of market share. That said, the relative positions of these three stations constantly fluctuate between one set of RAJARs and the next so everything remains to play for in terms of being biggest in London.
Finally, yet another good RAJAR outing for the Beeb, who recorded its highest ever share of the market - up to 55.4% - again proving that the commercial sector need to work together to regain some ground for the industry as a whole. The commercial sector, of course, knows this and keeps talking about doing it - though so far seems to have done very little about it (OK, there was UK Music Week, an event that pretty much passed me by without me even noticing). Though I'm sure they'd want me to point out they fare a lot better in the battle with the Beeb if you take the less advertiser friendly old people out of the equation - they being particular fans of the BBC radio network
And that's it, though I've carelessly missed out the local and digital stations, which I might dwell on a little in Monday's Daily.