The next set of RAJARs have been published today — figures that track numbers of listeners to live radio.
It comes with a characteristically opaque statement from the BBC Press Office hinting at how listener figures for BBC Radio 3 have gone down since the previous quarter’s results. Social media posts from the radio network celebrate the two million listeners now tuning in, with a graphic that provides no comparative figures. On the press release, “BBC Radio 3 has 2m listeners and its breakfast show had an audience of 827k”. In the previous quarter’s results released in October 2024, listenership had increased to 2.03m from 1.8million in the previous quarter.
Controller Sam Jackson is proud of the figure and the team’s achievements. Many of those changes have resonated well, whilst some have triggered an ‘exasperating’ reaction amongst some in the classical music press (according to Jackson at a recent Royal College of Music lecture). The network’s new near presenter-less streaming platform dedicated to unwinding, relaxing and chilling is, according to a piece in the Times garnering 104,000 listeners a weeks on BBC Sounds – a higher figure than Radio 3 management had originally hoped for. The BBC’s report on its own platform — BBC Sounds — was also published highlights 4.8million active users each week – making Radio 3 Unwind listeners approximately 2.17% of the total number of users. Radio 3 programmes don’t feature on the BBC Sounds top ten and top twenty lists of most popular programmes in the report; some music playlists do.
Many will rush to judgment using this as evidence of the transformation strategy — assertively moving Radio 3 away from its appealing esoteric feel towards a music-only station fit for the next generation — as failing. But Radio 3 management will be in this for the long game (and who wouldn’t be given the scale of the change). Exasperated classical music commentators will no doubt see that as justification to keep a close eye on what happens next.
