At 5.30pm last night, radio stations across the country were feverish with anticipation as they awaited their RAJAR audience results.

RAJAR is the industry system for measuring radio listening in the UK, and it provides us with results on a quarterly basis. 135,000 paper diaries are handed out each year for a random sample of respondents to complete for a week at a time, and these form the basis of the reports detailing how stations and the shows on them are faring.

Once upon a time getting your results meant a trip to RAJAR’s offices to collect them in person in a scene that was reminiscent of collecting your school exam results (always assuming that your exams got marked, unlike this year’s SATs!). These days you click on a link from your PC and you wait for a file to download. Up and down the country bosses from another 300 or so stations are doing the same thing, so it’s a slow process. Because Golden Square is so close to RAJAR’s offices in Wardour Street, we also send Carrie around to collect a paper copy of the numbers. Invariably Carrie gets back to the offices before the download has completed – the web traffic to RAJAR’s website is like visiting Ticketmaster on the day V Festival tickets go on sale.

When you get the data, there’s a mad rush to try and interpret them: What’s good and what’s not so good? Which audiences are we doing well in, and which audiences are we not doing so well against? And most scarily for DJs – which timebands are strongest and which are weakest? This time around we had a new system named “Ralf” to play with that helped us produce figures far quicker than we’ve been able to in the past.

So what do the figures tell us this time around?

Well for Virgin Radio there haven’t been many great changes. Broadly speaking we’ve gained listening around the country, continuing to do especially well with our digital listening, but we lost a couple of points in London where a fierce battle is fought for every listener. The station remains the number one commercial station for 15-44s with Christian’s breakfast show being the number one breakfast show for the same demographic.

Digital listening is very important for us, since it offers a significant increase in quality for our listeners – especially outside of London where it’s either digital or AM if you want to hear us. Overall about a quarter of all our listening is digital – be it on DAB digital radio, digital television, or via the internet. And our digital services, Classic Rock and Xtreme both saw some good gains.

Elsewhere there are two key stories: the success of Magic 105.4 in London, and a rare poor performance from the BBC.

Magic is now firmly the most popular commercial station in London with over 2 million people tuning in every week. Heart is the next most popular, and only then do you get to Capital, although Kiss is quite close on their heels, with us next on the list. London is somewhere where one or other station always seems to have a major marketing campaign or promotion taking place, and it’s hotly contested. Looking at the breakfast shows in particular, Johnny Vaughan and Denise Van Outen at Capital lead the way, followed by Neil Fox on Magic and Jamie and Harriet on Heart. Comparing breakfast shows is always less than straightforward because different shows run for different durations. So while Johnny starts at 6.00am and ends at 10.00am, Neil Fox starts at 5.30am but finishes earlier at 9.00am thereby missing out on some significant listening in the 9.00-10.00am hour. If Magic extended their show an hour, the good “Doctor” might have the biggest commercial breakfast show in London. Incidentally, you won’t see it reported in too many places, but the most popular breakfast show in London is actually the Today programme on Radio 4!

But the BBC, as I mentioned, has had a relatively poor quarter with Radio 1 and Radio 2 both losing significant numbers of listeners. In particular, Chris Moyles has lost over half a million listeners compared with last quarter.

Overall that means that commercial radio in the UK has gained a percentage point in overall share of listening, although the BBC still has a lead with a 56% share compared with commercial radio’s 42% (those numbers don’t add to up 100% incidentally because there are other services that aren’t enumerated by RAJAR including some smaller services, internet radio, pirate radio and so on). The BBC still has quite a lead, but it’s important for the prosperity and therefore the future of commercial radio that the gap is narrowed and that’s what’s happened this quarter.

Visit the RAJAR website if you want to look at everybody’s results in a bit more detail, or drop a comment if you’ve got a question about RAJAR.

Adam