The new Pure Sensia - Internet-connected DAB radio

[Featured in today's Radio Today]

William Rogers, the Chief Executive of UKRD and The Local Radio Company, wrote here recently detailing his reasons for leaving Radio Centre and why he didn’t think the time was right for Digital Radio Upgrade. He accused the entire radio industry of having no route map, and of not considering the consequences of its actions and he appeared to base his assumptions around a single estimated figure that only 21% of all Radio listening is currently digital.

That’s the figure that RAJAR reported (Q3:09) as being the UK average percentage of all listening to the radio that takes place on a digital device. But if there’s one thing we know for certain, it’s that this estimated figure is incorrect. That’s not to belittle RAJAR in any way, which is providing the best platform figure that it’s currently able to. But at the very least, there’s a substantial amount of digital listening that’s not currently being included.

RAJAR reports that there’s a further 12.8% of listening for which we don’t know the platform. It’s almost certainly split between both digital and analogue listening. But nobody knows what that split actually should be. So listening to digital platforms could actually be as high as 33.9%.

The 21.1% figure also represents 15-99 year-olds listening. This doesn’t take into account the share of listening that a younger, more commercially important 25-54 year olds where it rises well above 33%.

Following the most recent RAJAR results, Absolute Radio has been able to announce that we have now achieved 51.5% of our national listening via a digital platform. In doing so, we have surpassed that suggested 50% threshold laid out in the Digital Britain Report earlier this year, and we’re well on the way to becoming a fully digital station.

Digital radio, incidentally, is not solely DAB radio. While DAB is a vital part of it, with nearly ten million sets in 32% of UK homes, it’s critical that there is a one to many broadcast platform that’s free to listen to without associated telephony subscriptions or additional costs like bandwidth, digital radio does also include online and digital television. We welcome the news that the BBC is working with commercial radio to build a cross-industry internet radio player is potentially excellent news for many of those smaller services. The “discovery” functionality of the player will allow every station on the service to appear on a level playing field. Finally digital television, although more costly for radio stations to get on, is also part of the mix. In a post-2014 world when every TV in the UK will be receiving digital pictures, it’s a very useful & popular additional point of access.

But all of this makes it all the more imperative that the radio elements of the Digital Economy Bill, now in front of Parliament, are passed into legislation.

Currently UK radio is sitting in a halfway house and it simply cannot afford to maintain the current status quo, simulcasting across two different broadcast platforms. The dual distribution costs just aren’t bearable if we don’t know that there’s relief from the financial pain at some point in the future.

One of the main criticisms that commercial radio has aimed at it in recent times is the lack of investment in programming, and that’s something that at Absolute Radio we’ve been trying to set right, ranging from our Sony Gold Award winning coverage of festivals and concerts, through to last week’s documentary, The Elbow Story along with their homecoming concert in Manchester, and the signing of presenters such as Frank Skinner, Dave Gorman and Iain Lee. But the only way we can continue to invest in strong content such as this is to reduce some of our other costs and reinvest those savings into improving our on-air sound.

Digital listening continues to grow; at Absolute Radio we’ve now reached 6.3m live digital streamed hours per month, and we served a record 674,000 digital podcasts in the month of October. The radio route map is, and has to be, digital. If we try to ignore it, then we risk leaving our industry exposed to music services such as Spotify and Last.fm.

Staying put in an analogue world, or just dipping our toes into the digital water by leaves commercial radio in the same spectrum scarce position that we’re currently in. There’s no room for new national services, depriving listeners of the vibrancy of services such as Planet Rock, Jazz FM and our brand new service Absolute 80s. Digital rights this imbalance and indeed swings it in our favour, away from the BBC.

Smaller stations may indeed remain on FM, but this does not make it some kind of second class platform. The digital route map includes room for smaller commercial and community stations to remain on analogue and prosper in that environment especially when benefitted by new technology solutions like RADIO DNS and Content Tagging and relaxed regulation.

21% or 33.9% whatever the number is we clearly need to careful when quoting statistics to help drive policy and debate. The real decision will be made by the audience with their choice of brand, personalities, content and music. In a disruption world politicans and radio operators don’t decide what technology gets adopted consumers do and the evidence before me suggests they already have and it’s Digital.

Clive Dickens, Chief Operating Officer, Absolute Radio