Ofcom publishes an annual review of what it calls The Communications Market, and yesterday it published the latest edition. It’s a long document running to something like 360 pages, and I’ll readily admit that I’ve not yet read it all (if you fancy your own copy, download it here).

But I have had a look at the radio section, and here are a few interesting details from it.

Disappointingly, average hours spent listening to radio have fallen slightly to 20.6 hours a week from 21.2 hours in 2006. And while commercial radio overall is suffering a bit (although it improved last quarter, after many of the stats in this report had been compiled), Ofcom highlights the fact that national commercial radio is doing better with listening increasing by 3.2% between 2006 and 2007.

Interestingly, listening via the internet is not as biased towards the young as you might expect with consistant levels of listening between 15 and 64 year olds. Only older people use the internet less for the radio.

The report highlights the increasing numbers of WiFi radios in the marketplace. Connected up to your home network, these radios let you listen to literally thousands of stations worldwide, ‘listen again’ programming and even podcasts. Ofcom carried out some research last month suggesting that 6% of people claim to already have one of these devices while a further 11% would be interested in them. 6% sounds a little high to me, but undoubtedly these devices are gaining traction in the marketplace, and prices now start from as little as £50. Something to put on your Christmas list perhaps?

Ofcom details how 65% of analogue broadcasting revenue comes from stations playing what they define as chart-led and adult mainstream music. But the chart below shows how the marketplace has changed in the last five years (click on it to see in detail).

The last twelve months has seen an enormous change in ownership of radio groups – not least of which has been the sale of this station to TIML UK Ltd. The Ofcom report details these changes including EMAP Radio stations (including Kiss, Magic and Key 103) to Bauer and Global (owners of Heart amongst others) taking over GCap (including Capital FM and Classic FM) which has just been OK’d by the Office of Fair Trading.

Much of the report is made up of previously published data from RAJAR and other sources. But Ofcom also commissions its own research, and one of the questions they asked was about how satisified people are with the stations available to them. 48% said that they were “very satisfied” up from 38% last year, while only 4% said that they were disatisifed.

And finally, we’ve always known that our listeners use the internet while listening to the radio, but more people are doing this more often. 48% of web users have listened to the radio while online at some point with 13% doing so regularly and 21% doing it sometimes. 48% is up from just 22% a year ago.

Adam

We’ve had to say goodbye to a few people from Sales team in the last couple of weeks and last night there was a bit of a leaving do.

Helen’s been here for five and a half years and is off to become a teacher.

Jemma’s been working in scheduling for the last two and a half years, and is leaving to go and live in Australia.

And Vicky’s leaving to go and work for another radio station.

There are a few sore heads in the office today, and at least one of the above hasn’t been able to stop bursting into tears every few minutes – I’ll let you work out who that might be. But we wish them all well in the future.