RadioCentre (never “the radiocentre”) has just published Action Stations: The Output and Impact of Commercial Radio. It’s a 64 page report that highlights what it is that commercial radio actually does – it’s not simply playing recorded music with advertising interruptions.

The report is liberally sprinkled throughout with various research statistics like the fact that commercial radio broadcasts nearly 8 billion minutes of news a year or that almost of a third of stations play live music at least once a month.

It’s essentially a state of the nation overview of commercial radio highlighting the strengths of the sector’s reach – especially amongst 15-54 year olds – and an examination of where the sector’s advertising comes from (leisure, retail and motors to a very great extent).

The growth of digital radio is also highlighted, and that obviously remains very important, especially for a service who’s national transmission is largely via AM. The social responsibilities of many services are covered including how various stations covered local issues like teenage crime or last year’s severe floods.

But for me the most interesting piece is on page 44, and highlights how radio is still the primary place for music discovery. Radio can find itself facing a constant barrage of questioning about how surely it’s the internet where people discover music, and then they sideline radio by downloading it straight onto their iPod where they listen to it unencumbered by DJ interruptions, news, sport, traffic, travel or advertising.

Yet that’s simply not the case. RadioCentre’s research shows that 68% of respondents said that hearing music on the radio influenced them to go out and purchase it, compared with 24% for the internet and 22% for TV. Indeed 57% of respondents said that they’d downloaded a song having heard it on the radio. We also know from our own internal research that radio remains the main way our own listeners discover music.

Are there people who don’t listen to the radio and get their music another way? Certainly. But it’s actually quite hard work to do it, requiring time spent combing MySpace, forums and blogs. If you’ve got the time and the inclination, then of course you can do this. But radio stations actually employ people to do this for you. Every week we get sent hundreds of CDs and it’s down to our Head of Music and his colleagues to filter through those CDs, and the tracks that various record pluggers bring to the station. Few of us have the time to do this work ourselves.

Live music is also becoming an ever more important part of listeners’ lives; it’s seen some significant growth over the last few years, and is now the primary area that musicians and record labels are seeing for growth.  While I’ve been typing this I took time off to nip down to the Zoo here to see Sharleen Spiteri, formerly of Texas, record a live session (Ben Jones will have the audio on his show, while the video will be available shortly via our video player). But we’re not the only commercial station to support live music as the report makes clear.

So if you’re interested in reading about some of the broader aspects of the commercial radio industry, then RadioCentre’s new report is certainly worth a read.

Adam