BBC Radio 3’s audience slips as Classic FM’s troubles continue
BBC Radio 3 listeners are down and Classic FM’s audience is its second lowest on record, according to new figures from RAJAR (Radio Join Audience Research). Released today, the figures cover the second quarter of 2024. Launched in 1992, the RAJAR website lists quarterly listening figures on their website from 1999.
Classic FM has gained 13,000 listeners from March 2024, increasing 0.3% to 4.45 million. This is Classic FM’s second lowest audience since RAJAR figures began, with the previous quarter being the lowest.
There is now an overall trend of decline for Classic FM, having posted record lows for eight of the last 12 quarters, including dropping under 5 million listeners for the first time. Classic FM has lost over 1 million listeners from its pre-pandemic audience of 5.48 million in March 2020, a drop of 18.8%.
(RAJAR did not report quarterly figures between March 2020 and September 2021 due to the pandemic).
BBC Radio 3 has lost 162,000 listeners since March 2024, falling 8.1% to 1.83 million.
BBC Radio 3’s audience has historically fluctuated between 1.7 million and 2.1 million. This quarter sees BBC Radio 3’s audience fall 147,000 since the start of the pandemic, a decrease of 7.4%.
Before the pandemic, the gap between Classic FM and BBC Radio was 3.5 million listeners, but has now closed by 884,000 to 2.6 million, a reduction of 25.2%. This is due to the significant decline in Classic FM’s audience.
Scala Radio grew 8,000 listeners, from 188,000 to 196,000, an increase of 4.3%. It has lost over a third of its audience from before the pandemic, dropping 36.8% from 310,000 before the pandemic. Scala Radio has recently announced that it will be rebranding as Magic Classical later this year.
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