With all of UK radio in one place, the Radio Player is something that fascinates overseas radio people – as you’ll see from this writeup of one of my recent keynote speeches from California. “Coming together to provide one voice for radio” is something I speak a lot about – for good reason: because it grows all of radio as a result.

The UK RadioPlayer (known here simply as Radioplayer) has just released their first snapshot figures. And here they are…

5.7 million unique users over a four-week period
A unique user is defined here as an IP address

22.5 million listening sessions
A ‘listening session’ is defined as a launch of the RadioPlayer console, a switch between station, or an F5-like refresh of the player.

It’s difficult to compare these figures historically with anything released from the BBC and Absolute’s own radio players. However, anecdotally, I hear that almost every radio station is seeing maintained or increased listening hours – in spite of the new RadioPlayer’s preset system making it particularly simple to switch between radio services.

By way of comparison, at first glance these appear to compare favourably with Neilsen’s video streaming figures for April 2011 (copied here):

UK Radio Player players: 5.7m unique users, 22.5m total sessions
ITV video streams: 2.3m unique users, 36m total streams
Channel 4 video streams: 1.4m unique users, 55m total streams

Big news: the RadioPlayer is larger than ITV and Channel 4 combined. While the RadioPlayer figures are global figures (and ITV/C4 aren’t), the amount of non-UK streaming for internet radio is low, as I understand it – and certainly wouldn’t account for the 2m difference here. (Naturally, the Radio Player overwhelmingly plays live radio, which naturally will deliver less total streams than a 30-minute TV show).

Additionally, comScore say that there were 36.2 million unique internet users in the UK in March 2011. This gives the UK Radioplayer a 15.7% reach of all internet users; or, 11% of all adults 15+ per month.

The UK Radioplayer is, in short, massive. Full credit to Unique Interactive, the company’s technical partner, for making it all work without any apparent downtime; and each radio station’s tech teams for hosting it without mishap.

As Michael Hill, the Managing Director of Radioplayer, says: “Growing digital radio is a long game, but we now have two magic ingredients. A simple, consistent Radioplayer with millions of users, and an industry working collaboratively on its digital future. It’s a great start.”

And it is a great start – because these figures relate to the four-week period from 25th April to 16th May. A fairly large number of radio stations, notably the Orion, TLRC and UKRD stations, all joined after this date. The figures, even now, are a whole lot larger. Congratulations, all.

Disclaimer: I am working with Radioplayer on a future innovation workshop; and was involved in the project’s inception. I’ve had nothing to do with the current implementation, however.

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