Chris Moyles is closing in on Terry Wogan’s breakfast crown as a switch to “soft rock” helped Radio 1 to eat into sister station Radio 2’s audience.
A new 6.30am start time enabled the self-styled “saviour of Radio 1” to close the gap with his Radio 2 rival to just 420,00 listeners, according to the listenership monitoring group Rajar.
Wake Up To Wogan remains the nation’s favourite, with 7.73 million listeners. Moyles, recorded 7.31 million, his biggest audience yet.
Radio 1’s weekly audience rose to 10.69 million, up 430,000 year-on-year. Although Radio 2 remains the most popular station, it has lost nearly half a million listeners in 12 months and is down to 12.82 million.
Radio 1, which once backed rap, R&B and indie rock, now prefers melodic soft-rock bands such as the Feeling and the polite pop-soul of a new star, Adele. Radio 2, formerly the “pipe and slippers” station, has placed Morrissey on top of its playlist and is giving prominence to Radiohead, the Coral and Robert Plant.
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Commercial radio stations believe Radio 1’s role should be to support more musically challenging genres, aimed at younger listeners. But the new strategy was designed by competitive Radio 1 bosses after the station’s audience fell below 10 million.
Sarah Kennedy, whose bizarre on-air comments, attributed to bouts of illness, have provoked controversy, lost 150,000 listeners last year in her morning slot, which precedes Wogan.
Listening to digital radio broke through the 100 million hours-a-week barrier for the first time, despite fears that stations are being closed because of a lack of advertising revenue.
Digital now accounts for almost 17 per cent of all listening, with sales of DAB (digital audio broadcasting) sets rising to 6.5 million. BBC7, the spoken word and comedy station, enjoyed a record number of listeners, with 853,000 people tuning in each week, up from 672,000 last year.
The number of adults who claim to have listened to the radio via a mobile phone has increased by 21 per cent on the same period last year. Radio 3’s audience fell slightly to 1.95 million over the past year while Radio 4 has 9.29 million listeners.