What the radio figures actually say about multiplatform radio

Do you make podcasts? I’d be really grateful if you’d fill in the fifth annual Podnews Report Card. It’ll only take ten minutes. Thank you.

Above: the crowds make it to the RCS stand at Radiodays Europe.

I regularly see a bit of confusion about what radio ratings actually show. At least in the UK and Australia, and probably in many more markets, radio ratings are for the radio station across all platforms - they’re not ratings just for the analogue broadcasts. If you listen via the internet, or digital broadcasting, or even via the television, your listening is still counted - all the surveys care about is the radio station you’re listening to.

As an example: here’s “Commercial AM” from the Brisbane market, average listeners per quarter-hour, from 2013 to today:

This isn’t measuring the success, or otherwise, of AM. It’s measuring the success of those individual stations, which just happen to have an AM transmitter as one of the methods of transmission.

Let’s take a look at 4BH (oldies), the #1 AM station towards the right-hand side of this graph. It has an average audience of 24,000 (0530-2400). But they’re not all listening on AM.

But if listeners to 4BH follow the average for Australian radio listening, then only three out of five hours (61%) of their listening will actually be on AM. 20% will be via DAB+, and 18% will be via internet streaming.

4BH promotes DAB+ and the internet heavily, and given its signal on 1116 is not fantastic, you’d have to conclude that the amount of listening on AM is even lower than just 61%.

The CRA doesn’t show us the percentage of listening on DAB+ - indeed, 4BH is entirely absent from the DAB+ listening information, in spite of being simulcast there. But we can see from published figures (page 15) that 4BH has 24% of its listening online. That’s significantly higher than the average.

Given the significant promotion of DAB+ as well as online for 4BH, you might conclude that - for this station - AM listening is actually already in the minority. And, for ABC Radio Brisbane and 4BC, the online percentage is even higher.

At some point, it’ll make economic sense to turn off the AM. (Except, in Australia, appearance on DAB+ is contingent on you having an analogue licence, so it’s not quite that easy).

Classifieds

• In The Quarter Hour with Wade Kingsley: where now for ARN? Plus, I’m on as a guest saying not-very-much about Scott Mills, who has departed BBC Radio 2; and Matt O’Reilly speaking about what he learnt at Radiodays Europe, as well as Steve Jones from Stingray and Niall Power. He’s been a busy man.
• Supercharge your radio show with world-class prep: the right show prep delivered to you on time, EVERY day, without fail. Grab a £1 week-long trial of Show Prep and stop chasing round looking for things to use on your show, running out of time before the show, and trying to sight-read the newspapers!

• In Australia, stock market announcements that Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson have separately launched legal action against ARN. ABC coverage is here for Kyle, and here for Jackie. Henderson has claimed compensation of “at least $82.25mn”. As I type this, ARN shares are at an all-time low of $0.26, and a market capitalisation of $73.5mn. The company turned in a loss of -$34mn last financial year. ARN, it would seem, is ripe for a hostile takeover - it’s cheap as chips. And even if you were to factor in $164mn to make K&J both go away, it’s still cheap for what it is.

  • A personal view: while we talk about “Kyle & Jackie O”, conflating the two humans involved is probably unhelpful. I’ve no view on the merits of each of their cases, but Jackie appears to have been hard-working and professional throughout this, and it’s my opinion that she deserves a generous settlement. Kyle appears to be the epitome of old-fashioned lazy egotistic “talent”, and has repeatedly shown himself to be a misogynistic bully: behaviour which ARN appears to have enabled. Australian media will be better without him.

• I spoke on Nik Goodman’s excellently-run panel at Radiodays Europe. Fascinating to see the benefit of strong production values for a panel like that; and the session was standing-room only. The subject: Kyle & Jackie O, of course; but actually, a wider discussion about talent, pay, and a comparison with the comparatively tame enfant terrible of UK broadcasting, Chris Evans.

• RCS has a new President & CEO. Susan Larkin joins from Audacy, where she was COO.

• Staff at the ABC went on strike for the first time in twenty years. The BBC World Service was used to fill airtime on the radio. ABC Managing Director Hugh Marks said: “We will be using BBC content where that’s appropriate, so we will be maintaining services, but they won’t be the standard I would like to be on air.” Ooof. It’s a brave man who criticises the standard of BBC output!

• As Mister Brisbane, Brett Debritz shares Australian comedian Denise Scott’s routine on Melbourne radio station 3AW. Might also be worth sharing Jasper Carrott’s piece about local radio (from 1978), talking about working at BBC Radio Birmingham.

• Also, I wrote about my journey to Riga and back (and plenty of pictures of Riga, too); and about my little pocket-sized ebook-reader, and what it teaches us about keeping devices open.

Thank you to Daffydd Furnham, who has kindly become a personal supporter to this newsletter - “for always sating my curiosity on what the radio industry is doing across the world!”; and to the excellent folk at Radiozeit who were showing off a plethora of interesting tools at their stand at Radiodays Europe, including one intruiging one that is meant as an aid for programme directors to give aircheck sessions that is powered by data, rather than opinion. Very nicely done.

Where I am speaking next

• The Podcast Show, London UK (May 20-21) - I’ll be keynoting at this event, as well as recording a Podnews Weekly Review.
• Radiodays Asia, Jakarta Indonesia (Sep) - I’m usually a speaker at this event, and it’s a good one to be at.

Supporters

Thank you to the supporters below, plus Dafydd Furnham, Marty from New Yawk, Gavin Watson, Greg Strassell, Sam Phelps, Richard Hilton, Emma Gibbs, Jocelyn Abbey and James Masterton for being regular supporters.

If you’d like to support my work in any way, you can BuyMeACoffee - become a member to give regularly or just give a one-off coffee, or five. Here’s where to do that.

There’s a podcast version of this newsletter if you prefer that. I’m on Mastodon as @james@bne.social if you’re there too. And my website has more detail about who I am, and what I do, and whether I can help you further.

Selected bits from Radioland are in RadioInfo in Australia, and RAIN News in the US
Lesen Sie außerdem ausgewählte Artikel auf Deutsch in Radioszene