Radio 3’s apparent slump isn’t a crisis; it’s a reminder that the usual measurement no longer tells the full story. The audience hasn’t disappeared, we’re told. It’s moved into spaces that RAJAR can’t see and the BBC now controls. What looks like decline is really transition: from live radio to on-demand, from shared experience to personal choice.
So that’s all good.
Live radio listening figures have been made public for the previous quarter. Across the entire industry data shows listening is down. That’s bad news for classical music, isn’t it? Not necessarily.
First, the numbers.
BBC Radio 3 had a weekly reach of 1.8m and total hours listened 13.8m. Classic FM continues to dominate with 4.3m weekly reach and total hours listened 34.9m. No surprises there.
Most commentators are reporting a year-on-year drop both in terms of reach and hours listened. So, for Radio 3 reach is down 11.4% and hours down 16.1% compared to the same quarter 2024. For Classic FM the reach drop isn’t quite so severe. Weekly reach is down 3.5% compared to 6.5% for hours listened.
That percentage drop looks like bad news for Radio 3 – the home of classical music, doesn’t it? Not necessarily. (Why the difference? We’ll come to that. The discrepancy in percentages may well be down to the BBC’s promotion of BBC Sounds as a listening destination.)
For context, its worth looking at the wider industry (and what RAJARS – the council that tracks radio listening habits – tracks).
Across the industry, reach and listening figures are down. The same period measured across the radio industry sees reach fall 1.5% and total listening hours fall by 2.2%. Nowhere near as severe a drop as Radio 3. Classic FM remains fairly close to the industry wide reach drop.
So why did Radio 3 drop as much as it did? Where did their live listeners go? Is classical music dead in the water? The answer may well be found in its characteristically opaque ‘BBC Sounds Report’ for Q3 2025. Take a deep breath. We’re going in deep here.
Between Q3 and Q4 2024 the way the BBC measured listening for its own online destination BBC Sounds, changed. Last year it was using an external partner Piano Analytics for its Q3 data. This year, it credits its own inhouse data analytics team. There’s no question here that Piano Analytics wasn’t up to the job, only that the change in data source ushered in different metrics. The BBC’s in house analysis captures data points including, potentially, the ability afforded users on BBC Sounds (and not on live radio) to cycle back to the beginning of a live broadcast mid-way through the programme.
In its press release for RAJARs, the BBC inevitably leans more heavily on BBC Sounds than RAJARs, the data from the latter telling the story of a population using online more for live broadcast and DAB less. What that means in practice is that the story told is that all radio stations are being listened to by fewer people for less time. When in all likelihood what’s really going on is that the listeners are listening in a different way, not measured by RAJAR.
Why on earth is this important? For a number of reasons.
First, it suggests that in a fragmented world where broadcasters like Global and the BBC who own their distribution to audiences and the data that comes with it, comparisons are increasingly thorny territory. Beware people making broad brush stroke conclusions about the death of this and that.
Next, people are listening more on demand than they are live. But that in itself doesn’t mean they’re not listening at all. They just listen differently. For a Radio 3/Proms reference: people didn’t listen to the Proms as much live as they were tracked in previous years. What’s more important is that their preference for listening was captured at all.
What this might indicate is that RAJAR as a measure of reach is less meaningful than it once was. Yes, RAJAR does capture online listening, but it doesn’t account for the wealth of functionality offered to users.
The alternative data capture isn’t as readily available to consumers as RAJAR is however. Like Netflix for example, the data originating from BBC Sounds usage isn’t willingly made transparent by BBC management. The benefit fragmented listening habits presents the likes of the BBC (and their competitors) is ownership of data: they’re no longer subject to an independent body revealing their effectiveness.
What this might mean in practice is that Radio 3 – the home of classical music – hasn’t really suffered a dip in listenership. Instead, it means the listeners have gone to (in effect) a garden where tracking is a little more difficult. For the past year, for example, the BBC has spent an enormous of time, effort, and listener loyalty promoting not only the concert or track you’re about to listen to but the way of listening back to it almost as soon as you’ve heard it. There’s a payoff for that. Listeners will stop thinking about the radio and more about the name ‘BBC Sounds’. People will associate anything audio on the BBC with BBC Sounds. Radio is dead. BBC Sounds is The Thing. Little wonder the data backs up that marketing strategy.
There is a useful political pay off for BBC management. Any changes implemented which might otherwise have been used as a stick to beat them when the data suggests failure, can be doubled down on. Radical changes to the Radio 3 schedule haven’t caused a dip in live listening. The industry trend proves that listening habits have changed. So, there’s no need to worry. Everything’s fine. We’re vindicated. Carry on as normal.
Credit for the number crunching here to Adam Bowie.
