RAJAR figures

The RAJAR figures have been announced today and overall show a decline in radio audiences over the summer. Of course this can be described as usual as people are away on holiday and people who use their radio to wake them up and keep it on while they are getting ready for University/work might no longer need it during the summer as they are off but as the latest figures show we have not reached the point of the death of radio and I doubt we ever will.

A background article for how the BBC radio are doing can be found here and shows that even the BBC radio stations have dipped, not good news as someone who does a radio show but as I am on a journalism print route I'm not as affected by this news as I could be.

John Plunkett, on the Guardian Unlimited website, tells us how BBC radio FiveLive and radio Four have also suffered.

I regularly listen to the manchester branch of this station when back at home and am slightly surprised to see it has lost audiences, I say only slightly, due to the XU interactive feature instead of DJ's. In principle it's a good idea but something about it just isn't quite there at the moment but it may be the future.

Something else that was the future now seems to be the present as digital listening has increased as 15% of radio listening is now via a digital platform as it explains here and here.

In such a saturated market already with such competition and the need to capture and keep an audience listeners are constantly experiementing and the nationals seem to be leading the way over locals as Daniel Farey-Jones writes.

Just one example of how people see Radio nowadays can be found on a blog here. Now I am not the most avid radio listener but with other technologies like iPod's and MP3's and even CD's then people can download the songs they like best and have them on wherever, at home or in the car, on the way to work etc so one song that someone doesn't like and wham! the radio is off or the station switched - hey, I am as guilty for that as most people.

In today's world we need to be gripped and stay gripped, after all Radio seems to have the tag for being something we do while we're doing something else but it still plays a big part in our consumption of the media and long may it continue in my view.

As long as people keep listening to the radio as I have a work experince placement on the news team of a local station in the new year so it needs an audience!