Latest RAJARs

[teamsaint]

Another of the difficulties one has in dealing with people at the BBC whose eyes glaze over when you mention numbers is that it seems they can't grasp that there is a profound difference between, say, 1.2% and 1.1% when talking about listening share. So what's a drop of just 0.1%? Isn't that 'stable'? When it's a share of a total of 1 billion listening hours per week, 0.1% is a million hours per week - a lot for a station that only racks up about 12m hours per week in total.

wrong kind of numbers, perhaps?

one approach to numbers is to say that funding for arts programming will increase by 20%, whilst (conveniently) ignoring the actual cash that this will be approx £4m PA, by my reckoning.

Another thing that that Andrew's chart might not be able to shine light on,understandaby, is that the population is apparently ageing.Well according to headlines in the newspapers.Either way, it is a factor. So reach against population needs a further caclulation.
Or a 5 dimensional graph.

Or a BBC spokesperson....

[french frank]

wrong kind of numbers, perhaps? [ ... ] Or a BBC spokesperson....

Tu dis!

I had an email from a supporter on Thursday saying that the news headline (on Radio 3, of course) was that the audience had gone up by 100,000. Now "it will be even harder to make them change their ways". That is a common Radio 3/PR statement that can be factually demonstrated yet is designed to mislead. I could equally say (but wouldn't) that compared with when Roger Wright took over at the end of 1998 the audience had gone down by ... wait a mo: 190,000. But who's going to waste a PR opportunity to announce to tens of thousands of listeners that the listening is UP?

And Zucchini has the sheer, barefaced, brass neck to accuse me of 'always finding fault'. It's quite possible I could make a mistake in my calculations now and again, but I don't try to mislead anyone. I don't deliberately make statements which are "factually incorrect" (a nice phrase I learned from someone at RAJAR, referring to a statement by someone at Radio 3).

I've done an analysis on whether you can say the figures were UP or DOWN, and if Zucchini is away checking my figures, perhaps he (or anyone else!) would announce any mistakes he finds so that conclusions can be reconsidered. (Re spin doctors: I hadn't listened to the Thursday 7am headlines to check whether what I had been told was correct. Now I have, and it was).

[Sir Velo]

Another of the difficulties one has in dealing with people at the BBC whose eyes glaze over when you mention numbers is that it seems they can't grasp that there is a profound difference between, say, 1.2% and 1.1% when talking about listening share. So what's a drop of just 0.1%?

Actually - assuming total audience remains the same - a fall in audience share from 1.2% to 1.1% represents a decrease of 8.5% in listeners for the station. Either BBC management aren't very bright when it comes to basic maths, or they're trying to hoodwink an even more stupid press.

[Andrew Slater]

Perhaps it's time to club together and take out a year's subscription to RAJAR: £2,214.62 inc. VAT for the 'Web' option, which appears to include half-hourly breakdown by age, and a quarter-hour chart. The file containing the prices is here.

[Thropplenoggin]

Perhaps it's time to club together and take out a year's subscription to RAJAR: £2,214.62 inc. VAT for the 'Web' option, which appears to include half-hourly breakdown by age, and a quarter-hour chart. The file containing the prices is here.

The £0.62 is on me.

[french frank]

Perhaps it's time to club together and take out a year's subscription to RAJAR: £2,214.62 inc. VAT for the 'Web' option, which appears to include half-hourly breakdown by age, and a quarter-hour chart. The file containing the prices is here.

Very enticing, the only snag is that it's just for ONE year and we don't know what has gone before, what comes after &c. But worth some thought? (Good spot, Andrew. I've never been too clear about non broadcaster rates.)

The other snag is that our one subscription may hit a record year for R3 ... :-)

[Andrew Slater]

If 500 supporters were each to donate £5 annually, we could subscribe perpetually ... or 250 supporters £10 each ....

[french frank]

I always had the impression that we wouldn't have the necessary software to extract the microscopic percentage of information that we were interested in ... but I may have been mistaken.

Interesting the stipulation that we have to stick to the Publication Code. The whole point of our (futile) two-year battle to get the BBC to make the information public was that it could then be publicly commented on. I presume we wouldn't be allowed (by the copyright holder - the BBC) to tell the public the information, even if we had paid for it?

I was pleased to see that what RAJAR told me a number of years ago is accurate: that the broadcasters (not RAJAR) hold the copyright for their own figures. The 'BBC' told me originally that their contract with RAJAR limited what they were allowed to tell the public. That was another half-truth. They aren't allowed to tell us the figures for other broadcasters e.g. Classic FM (but we weren't asking them to) even though they have them but, as RAJAR said, they can do what they like with their own figures - including keeping them secret from the public

[aeolium]

If 500 supporters were each to donate £5 annually, we could subscribe perpetually ... or 250 supporters £10 each ....

I am utterly unenthusiastic about this (if it's a serious suggestion). It could be argued that the obsession with RAJAR results is a symptom of the BBC's problems and neither they nor their critics should be so concerned about them. After all, the figures are a measure of popularity not quality. Increasing listening figures do not - necessarily - mean that the quality of the programmes is improving; they could mean the reverse. And conversely, worsening listening figures do not - necessarily - mean the quality of the programmes is worsening. It's not difficult to envisage a change in programming which would quite possibly depress listening figures: more drama and other spoken arts programmes, more contemporary music broadcasts, more music from the less familiar peripheries of the repertoire. But if listening figures did drop significantly, what would that prove except that the audience for this kind of programming is smaller?

The obsession with ratings is part of the current problem for the BBC. The greater its obsession with them, the closer it moves towards aping the ratings-driven imperatives of the commercial broadcasters. In reflecting, and thereby perhaps intensifying, this obsession I don't think the BBC's critics do it service.

[french frank]

You and I know this, aeolium, and I agree with the spirit of what you say, but try making reasoned arguments which are outside their understanding. 'Quality' is measured by asking people who listened to a programme to 'rate' how much they enjoyed it, on a scale of one to 10. Measuring 'high quality' consists of asking viewers/listeners if they think such-and-such a service is 'high quality'; and, believe it or not, measuring 'distinctiveness' (important PSB characteristic) means asking the public if they think the service is distinctive. I'll agree that measuring quality is fraught with difficulty but experience seems to show that the BBC runs on fixed tracks: move off those tracks and you get no real response at all.

[Andrew Slater]

The only purpose of having the information would be to allow us to see what was happening, rather than taking the BBC's word for it. Several arguments have been difficult to substantiate in the past because we had no hard figures, and the BBC knew it. I agree that the RAJAR figures are of little intrinsic value. However, the BBC seems to use them to influence strategic positions, and as such, it would help us to be able to see the reasons for their decisions and the results of changes in hard numbers. Speculation would then be unnecessary!

[Russ]

R3's good set of results in Q1 has turned, for Q2, into the worst set of quarterly figures in recent times since Q2 2010.

2014 Q2's reach of 1884k is 11% down on the previous quarter, and the hours listened to, at 10598k, is a whopping 31% down on the previous quarter. As a consequence, the average weekly hours per listener, has slumped to 5.6, another near-record low. Breakfast listening is 526k, which I think is an all-time low (but FF's records are probably better than mine).

An overnight recent thread, RAJAR-Radio-3-in-Decline?, beat me to it this time around, but I'm reporting the basic figures in this thread for the sake of thread continuity.

No doubt the Excel wizards will be along soon with their graphs.

Russ

[johnb]

No doubt the Excel wizards will be along soon with their graphs.

Your word is my command, though "bumbling amateur" would be a more appropriate description.



As you can see, the second quarter has often been poor but it is difficult not to conclude that the trend has been a gradual decline in R3 reach since 2011.

(Once again, please let me know if you see any errors in the chart.)

[french frank]

An overnight recent thread, RAJAR-Radio-3-in-Decline?, beat me to it this time around, but I'm reporting the basic figures in this thread for the sake of thread continuity.

I added the "RAJAR" to the title to signal the subject matter!

Yes, Breakfast at 526K was at an all-time low, though we have to compare only the figures since it was reduced from 180 minutes to 150 minutes in 2011. One would expect a slump in the Breakfast figure to have an affect on the overall reach, since Breakfast has the largest audience***. The reduction in listening figures, to an extent, goes with the lower reach, but the average per listener is down, so DOWN really does mean DOWN.

The usual, well-practised, BBC response is that the Mar-June quarter is usually a poor one, which, again, is partially true. So, let's see: this June 1.884m, 2013 1.995m, 2012 2.038m, 2011 2.174m, 2010 1.858m (listening hours also very comparable), 2009 2.026m, 2008 1.910m, 2007 1.783m (lowest ever - in the wake of the arrival of the new Breakfast programme and sundry other changes, in the previous February). So, of the last eight 2nd quarters, two have been lower, which puts that argument into perspective.

*** At least, since the 10.00-midday slot was increased to 3 hours, Essential Classics probably has the largest audience. CD Masters used to get over 600K listeners when it was only two hours long.

PS Thanks to johnb again for providing the graph!

[DracoM]

Q: impact of fine weather? Do people get out and about and listen less to R3 in hot weather?