I was taken aside by an important person in the radio industry about three months ago. “Now, James,” he said, “you really must stop wanting everyone to listening to radio over the internet.” He started telling me about portability, and cost of receivers, internet connections, etc, before I stopped him. I believe no such thing.

Others claim I’ve a rabidly anti-internet radio position – preferring DAB to internet.

I’ve repeatedly said that I actually don’t care how people listen. I’m more concerned with whether they listen at all. And to ensure people listen, you need to make radio available on multiple platforms.

Recently I mentioned RAJAR research that internet radio listening is just 2.2%, and called that figure “tiny”. This rankled with someone, who gave arguments about RAJAR not including, in their main survey, on-demand services, personalised radio and podcasts; and a question of whether non-subscribers and international radio are measured. It’s a well-worn argument, so it’s a worthwhile exercise to work out what the ‘real’ figures might be.

On-demand at the BBC accounts for 26% of online radio listening (according to Mark Friend in a speech at the Radio Festival); and if you were to optimistically assume that every other radio service also runs on-demand listening to the same degree (they don’t), that might give you an extra 0.6% of total radio listening.

RAJAR’s separate research on platforms shows that 3.9 million people claim to have (ever) listened to personalised radio like last.fm and Spotify. That’s only 23% of the 16.9 million people who’ve (ever) listened to internet radio as a whole; and assuming people listen to last.fm or Spotify the same length as traditional radio – probably not very realistic – that might be another 0.5% of listening.

RAJAR also measure podcasts in this research. The typical podcast listener, they say, listens to just over an hour a week; and there are 7.8 million podcast listeners. That’s 8 million hours, then, to podcasts, compared to over 1 billion hours of radio listening a week – or, if you like it better that way, 0.7% of total radio listening.

RAJAR does measure non-subscribers or internet-only radio stations. It’s there, under ‘other listening’, in the main RAJAR figures. “Other” accounts for 2.7% of total radio listening – which could be FM listening to pirates or community stations, just as much as it could be internet listening. Taking a 50% share of this for internet radio would be optimistic, though would add 1.4% to total internet radio listening.

So, even if you did agree that RAJAR “misses” much internet radio listening, it’s interesting to note that adding these perceived “misses” gives you a wildly optimistic 5.4% of total radio listening over the internet; still considerably lower than DAB (13.1%), and not much higher than listening over the TV (3.3%). I’d still maintain that 5.4% is tiny.

Now.

There’s another way to check our figures, of course; and that’s to use actual published figures for internet radio listening, rather than rely on RAJAR’s research.

RAJAR claims that ‘all BBC’ has 561,706,000 total listening hours of live radio per week; and if RAJAR is correct, listening to live internet radio is 2.2% of total hours. That should be 12,357,532 weekly online hours.

The BBC’s site says that in August 2009, people listened to live BBC radio for 18,470,176 total hours online. That figure’s monthly; a weekly equivalent (by simply dividing by 31 and multiplying by 7) is 4,170,684 total hours. Which isn’t 2.2% of all listening. It’s actually 0.7%.

Which begs two questions…

1. Is the BBC significantly underperforming the industry as a whole online? It accounts for 54% of all radio listening, so does that mean that commercial radio has 6% of all their radio listening online? (Perhaps this is true – Absolute appears to have 10%, according to their recently published online figures).

2. Are the internet radio industry significantly over-estimating exactly how many people are listening through the internet?

I don’t know the answer; and given my track record in increasing quality and reach of internet radio stations, I’m quite interested in what the deal is here.

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