Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper said the station had a “real challenge on its hands” in the face of streaming services such as Spotify and newly-launched Apple Music headed by Radio 1’s former star DJ, Zane Lowe.
The detailed listening figures for the station’s breakfast DJ Nick Grimshaw reveal just how much. Grimshaw has lost 1.24 million listeners, or 18% of the audience he inherited from Chris Moyles three years ago, down from 6.7 million listeners to 5.5 million listeners a week in the first three months of this year.
When Cooper congratulated Grimshaw on “scaring off the over-30s” – a sentiment that prompted some criticism on Twitter – he had a point. Of the listeners who have turned off the Radio 1 breakfast show since Grimshaw’s debut in September 2012, just over 1 million – or 83% of them – were aged 30 or over.
Less welcome for Cooper is that 210,000 people also stopped listening in Radio 1’s target audience of 15- to 29-year-olds. Grimshaw now has 2.6 million listeners aged 15 to 29, down from 2.8 million in Moyles’ last three months on air, against 2.9 million listeners aged 30 or over, down from Moyles’ 3.9 million.
Tipped for a judge’s role on the new series of Simon Cowell’s The X Factor, Grimshaw is a key weapon in the station’s efforts to retune to a younger audience following years of criticism that it had grown too old.
But despite the DJ’s best efforts, Grimshaw still had more than 1.1 million listeners aged 45 or over at the beginning of this year. The proportion of his audience in this age bracket actually increased, albeit marginally, since the same period in 2014, from 18.6% to 20.3%.
This is presumably what Cooper meant when he has talked about the difficulty of shrugging off older listeners who are reluctant to retune to Radio 2 or 6 Music, the “trendy adults who just refuse to lose interest in new music”.
The latest audience figures were a record low for Grimshaw, dipping as far as Sara Cox’s last audience in 2003.
It is a pattern reflected by Radio 1 as a whole, which fell to 9.7 million listeners at the start of this year, also a 12-year low. Its 15- to 29-year-old audience fell 6.9% over the past year, to 4.3 million, while its over-30 audience fell faster, by 8.7%, to 5.4 million.
The station’s average age, among listeners aged 15 or over, was 34.2 in the first quarter of this year, marginally younger than the previous three months but two years older than a decade ago, when the average age was 32.2.
The challenge of holding onto young listeners – and attracting new ones – is not to be underestimated. An Ofcom report last year revealed that 16- to 24-year-olds spent 15 hours a week listening to the radio compared with more than 21 hours a week a decade earlier.
Cooper, not long after taking the job, predicted that “traditional radio for young people is dead in about a generation. We’ve got to work out what radio looks like on a smartphone, iPad and IPTV.”
Radio 1 has done more than most (certainly on the BBC, and until BBC3’s future becomes more clear) to adapt to the on-demand world, on YouTube and with its own channel on the BBC’s iPlayer. Radio 1 typically has 1m views a day on its YouTube channel and another 1m requests for content on its iPlayer service.
But success here is harder to measure – Cooper has compared the traditional way of measuring radio audiences as like a “publisher only looking at the book sales from a high street bookshop, rather than taking into account Amazon” – so a difficult transition is inevitable.
“The BBC needs to stop thinking about TV channels and radio stations and think about content for certain demographics. If we don’t adapt, we will die,” he said in March. “As a person running a traditional radio station, you should be afraid, you should be very afraid.”
Nick Grimshaw v Chris Moyles - who stopped listening?*
Adult weekly reach: 5.49 million v 6.73 million (down 18%)
15- to 29-year-olds: 2.59 million v 2.79 million (down 7.5%)
30 or over: 2.91 million v 3.94 million (down 26%)
Proportion of audience decline that is aged 30 or over: 83%
* Figures are for Grimshaw first quarter 2015 v Moyles third quarter 2012
