The latest RAMS report (released August 2014), which was researched in field from May 2014 to July 2014, shows radio listenership in general is stable. But with consumers having a wide variety of media to consume is radio losing its touch? Laiza Zikalala looks for answers.
Radio listenership across weekday and weekend for both commercial and community radio stations shows little change. The profile of listenership by gender, age, LSM and population also remained stable between the June 14 and August 14 diaries.
Time Spent Listening (TSL)
Diary on diary (June 14/August 2014) time spent listening (TSL) has gone down by two minutes while weekly TSL is down by a massive 12 minutes.
Interestingly, even though Limpopo province has a lower number of stations listened to (1.9 stations listened to by each person on average), they come out tops in overall time spent listening at an average of four hours per person, showing high levels of loyalty from their audiences. Gauteng on the other hand, may have the highest of number of stations listened to at an average of 2.3 stations per person but loyalty with listeners is lower with an average TSL of 03h18 minutes.
The top five stations according to the percentage of TSL by region (Mon- Fri averages) is:
In Gauteng:
•Lesedi FM: 12% average listenership
•Metro FM: 12%
•Ukhozi FM: 10%
•Jacaranda FM: 6.6%
•Kaya FM: 6.4%
The above picture changes when you use English as a home language filter, with commercial stations coming out tops: Highveld (22.2% TSL) 702 (14.7%) and Jacaranda (10.7%).
Western Cape
•Umhlobo Wenene FM: 20.9%
•RSG: 13.8%
•KFM: 11.5%
•Heart: 10.2%
•Good Hope: 8.6%
Again, when English is added as a home language filter, the picture changes. KFM comes out tops for this region with an average TSL of 20.5%, Heart 19.6%, GoodHope FM12% and 5FM 8.4%.
KwaZulu-Natal
•Ukhozi FM: 60.2%
•Gagasi: 11.2%
•East Coast: 10.2%
•Metro : 3.4%
•Lotus : 1.9%
With English as the home language filter, East Coast Radio leads the way with 50.9%, followed by Lotus FM at 14.7%, 5FM at 5.8% and Hindvani at 5.6%.
Stations that had significant changes (June ‘14/Aug ‘14)
The audience figures of the majority of the stations surveyed remained stable. But some had significant changes.
Off a small base, Radio Kansel/Pulpit is down by 35% for the ‘past seven days’ (P7D) and 42% down for Mon – Fri listenership. Radio 2000’s audience is down by 13% for both P7D and Mon – Fri and YFM’s audience is down by 11% for both P7D and Mon – Fri, with losses mainly from Pretoria and the Reef areas.
Highveld’s listenership is down by 8% for P7D and 9% for Mon – Fri; the loss is mainly from the Pretoria area.
Ukhozi FM is still the largest station in the country with 7 616 000 listeners P7D and 4 585 000 Mon – Fri and it is also the most favoured station in the country.
Eight out of the top 10 favoured stations are African Language Stations, which shows that people still prefer to be communicated in their mother tongue.
Source: RAMS August 2014
Laiza Zikalala is associate media director at The MediaShop. This post was first published in the company newsletter.
