Weekly listening via the internet is growing – according to the latest “MIDAS” RAJAR research.

A year ago, 14.5m people claimed to have listened to “the radio via the internet” “last week”. This year, 16.1 million claim to have done so. That’s a startling increase of over 10% year-on-year. Impressive.

Drill down further, though, and you get to see the real story: and it’s not a very pleasant story for my friends in commercial radio.

The RadioCentre proudly claims that commercial radio punches above its weight in digital homes, and is the market leader for younger audiences. So when it comes to the internet, commercial radio should be achieving more than the 43% market share it currently has for radio listening, right?

The stark finding from this research is that 71% listen to the radio by going direct to BBC radio station websites – and only 24.5% go direct to commercial radio websites. It gets worse: if you look at “media players gathering several radio stations”, 51% listen through the BBC iPlayer, 15% listen via iTunes, and 23% listen via “something else”.

When I worked at Virgin Radio (now Absolute), its internal online audience figures were higher than the BBC’s published figures for the competing Radio 2 (and even, actually, Radio 1). Absolute’s in iTunes – most other commercial stations aren’t. So, I’m guessing that Absolute is bouying up the rest of commercial radio’s figures – which must make the rest really dismal. (Of course, we don’t know, since no commercial radio company publishes its online audience figures – audited or not).

Commercial radio is in curiously poor shape online. The much-needed consolidation and simplification of radio buying, spearheaded by the RadioCentre, hasn’t benefited commercial radio websites – which are still a ramshackle of different ad banner sizes and different offerings.

Commercial radio’s failure to understand the web is exemplified by the RadioCentre Player. The original player was marketed to advertising agencies with great chutzpah: except it successfully hid all advertising opportunities available within the online radio players. The video at-launch on Virgin Radio’s; the Microsoft sponsorship of Capital Radio’s; the listen-again functionality of Kiss – all of this was unavailable, as the RadioCentre Player hotlinked direct into the station streams, bypassing the carefully-branded radio players in use by the industry. To add insult to injury, news headlines within the player came from… the BBC. Cough. It’s probably not a surprise that the first that commercial radio’s new media departments knew of the player was the launch press release.

The concept of the RadioCentre Player is a good one – and, being fair, that player is now markedly better than the first release. Commercial radio – indeed, radio in general – needs one place for programme schedules, for information like “what kind of music does this station play”, for more interactive additions to the experience. And it’s not as if the content’s lacking – there’s huge diversity of content carried on commercial radio -from documentaries, to engaging speech, to religion and ethnic programming, which should be celebrated. Where’s the widget to add my favourite (commercial) radio station onto my Facebook page, or my MySpace page? Where’s the thing on the Divine Comedy website telling me when Neil Hannon is playing live on my local radio station?

The RadioCentre has done a great job at making radio easier to buy. In the online world, it’s in the perfect position to make fantastic relationships with websites, wifi radio manufacturers, and others to protect radio’s future in the new media landscape – perhaps working together with the BBC. While it might be difficult for those in Shaftesbury Avenue right now, understanding the web better is one opportunity that commercial radio has to grasp – and the RadioCentre (and the DRDB) is in exactly the right place to do it.

Photo: Donna Grayson. Used under licence. As always, these are my own personal views; and the views of my employer will probably differ.

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