Numbers Up
While the UK radio industry continue to the debate where they’re going with DAB, listeners keep buying new radio sets in their droves.
RAJAR numbers for Q1 2008 were released this week containing lots of good news for digital radio with Reach and Share both up. The big figure is the increase in ownership of DAB radios. 27% of the population now own a DAB set at home. As a friend of mine always says, that’s 14 million unsubsidised radios. Could Sky TV beat that? I don’t think so!
I put this growth another way to someone recently and got an interesting reaction. “Over 70% of radio listening is done on AM or FM”. Naturally the reply was “So what?”. I responded with “Five years ago it was 100%” and suddenly was pumped with questions about what was “taking over”. The answer of course is digital.
Across the three main digital platforms, DAB is the outright leader with almost 70% usage. Digital TV and Internet follow with 20% and 15% respectively. While the RAJAR figures show substantial growth for DAB, it’s interesting to see relatively stable figures for tv and internet.
The general industry opinion in the UK is that digital is here to stay. Too much has been invested by the broadcasters and takeup is too strong by listeners to let it go. Meanwhile digital see’s new launches this year in Germany, Australia, Ireland and many other countries worldwide.
Digital is happening with tv, with newspapers and our phones so it’s inevitable the same will happen with radio.
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