How Well Do You Know Radio? Manchester Edition

In lots of the presentations that I do at radio stations and conferences I often use data to challenge pre-conceptions. We are all sometimes guilty of projecting our own thoughts and experiences and assuming that everyone must think and do the same things. The good thing about data is it can strip out our own prejudices.

I had an interesting Twitter conversation with James Cridland and Phil Riley about digital listening. I was looking at some London RAJAR and it turned out that 'digital listening' (that's DAB, DTV and Internet) was bigger than all of the listening of Radio 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 combined. Which surprised me a bit. Phil and James thought that using London as an example wasn't representative of the rest of the country and James felt Manchester would be very different.

As I had run a load of Manchester data, I thought I would share it here. This chart is quite different to many that I run as it combines many different things. It looks at total hours to the main stations in Manchester (Key 103 TSA) but it also adds in total platform hours and listening location hours too (all Q3/2013 data).

Things I found interesting:

• DAB listening is larger than any radio station in the area


• Indeed it's larger than Radio 1 and 2 combined


• ...and bigger than all in-car listening in the area


• At home listening (on its own) is bigger than all analogue listening


• Internet listening is bigger than Radio 1


• 6 Music has more hours than Real Radio


• Absolute 80s is bigger than Absolute Radio


• Five Live is bigger than every local station except Capital


• talkSPORT is bigger than Classic FM