For Absolute Radio, it’s all about depth.

We would like to provide a service to enrich our listeners’ lives. That begins with entertaining programmes of the sort Frank Skinner is presenting on a Saturday morning, the coverage of a summer full of amazing live music coming soon, or our daily promise to play more songs with less repetition. It extends to the web, where we take great effort to offer videos of interviews and sessions, but where we also communicate directly. It now extends to the meetings in our building; if you care passionately about the music we play, you can join us in a Open Playlist session that really does help shape what we play on-air.

So our audience is becoming our community. We would like to offer each other more services. Our first iPhone app is an extremely simple way to let people listen to us in better quality than they might have been able before. We would like to offer more exclusive pre-sales of gig tickets so our audience has a better chance of seeing their favourite bands and in doing this we hope our community, that enjoys hearing the artists we play, thinks of us first when they want to buy tickets to see those artists live. This trust in our service can then spread to a trust in the services and products our advertisers offer.

The other benefit to this deep relationship is the length of time our community spend listening, because as a commercial radio station where the primary income still comes from spot advertising, the number of hours spent listening is key. A single person that tunes in for an hour a day can be more important than three people who only listen to 15 minutes apiece. This is why we’re offering programmes that grab your attention like Christian and Geoff whilst also providing more music at the times of day when radio can compliment other activities such as work. By more music we mean both the number of different songs we play across a week and the amount of songs played in an hour.

Is it working? We will have to wait until the very end of October to see how RAJAR tracks our first year of reported listening, but our own research shows that we have made clear progress. In January only 8% of listeners said that the name Absolute Radio was the first brand to come to mind when thinking about us. That’s now risen to 42%, but it’s still outweighed by Virgin Radio on 54% so there’s more work to be done. With festivals, stadium and outdoor gigs plus hopefully a nice night out at the Sonys on the way, we’ll do our best to mix business with pleasure though.