Eye off the Ball
Zoe loses 1m R2 listeners
ZOE Ball has lost nearly a million listeners from the Radio 2 breakfast show in the year since she took over from Chris Evans.
Radio 1 overall figures have also dropped, to 8.8 million, the lowest since records began.
Some 8.2 million a week tuned in to Zoe during the last quarter of 2019, down from 9.1 million 12 months earlier with Chris.
This number was still up from the quarter before, when she pulled in 7.9 million weekly listeners, according to audience research body Rajar.
Chris, meanwhile, has had a slight increase in listeners on his Virgin Radio breakfast show, from one million to 1.2 million, since he started last January.
The Radio 1 fall is way down from the peak of 11.9 million in the end of 2011.
The station’s breakfast show with Greg James dropped from 5.1 million at the end of 2018 to 4.8 million a year later.
Meanwhile, Radio 4 increased its audience from 6.8 million to 7.2 million in the same period, including a record weekly audience of 2.3 million at the end of last year.
And Radio 3 figures soared to 2.1 million, its most since 2016.
Overall the BBC’s share of listeners was over 50%. James Purnell, director of BBC Radio, said: “Our brilliant stations are much loved by our audiences. The latest figures show some of the challenges we face across the radio industry with retaining a live listening habit amongst young people, whose audio consumption is rapidly changing.” He said the Beeb wants to diversify what is on offer to keep listeners interested.
He added that the fact BBC Sounds got over 100 million plays of content on demand last quarter shows more are listening outside of live broadcasts.