MUMBAI: Five years after almost getting the axe, BBC’s Radio 6 Music hit 2 million weekly listeners; a first for the digital radio. According to reports, the radio station touched an average of 2.1 million listeners on a weekly basis during the last three months of 2014.
The milestone comes after BBC intended to shut down the digital radio in 2010 in a cost-savings attempt. At the time, the digital radio had less than 700,000 listeners. However, massive listener support, much of it coming from Facebook, prevented management from closing down the digital radio.
Currently, the music station has a line-up of presenters like Stuart Maconie Lauren Laverne, Mark Radcliffe and Guy Garvey, who is a member of the band- Elbow. DJ Steve Lamaq, a former Radio 1 presenter, hosts BBC Radio 6 Music’s most popular show, and has over 900,000 listeners tuning into his weekday teatime slot.
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Radio 6 Music, will later in the month, present its own festival with acts like Interpol, The War on Drugs, The Maccabees and a number of others slated to perform.
Along with Radio 6, another BBC digital radio- Radio 4 Extra, recorded a new feat, reaching 1.7 million listeners. The station broadcasts repeats of drama and comedy programmes throughout the day, all over the country.
BBC Radio 2 and BBC 6 Music controller, Bob Shennan reacted to the news saying, “felt like a landmark moment”, adding that even though it may not be a “mass mainstream station like Radio 1 or Radio 2”, they will look forward to the next landmark, 2.5 million or so.
However, not all BBC Radio stations reported higher numbers. Radio 5 Live, which is BBC’s sport and news station, was down to 5.6 million listeners in the last quarter of 2014 from 5.8 million in the previous quarter of the same year. Radio 1 was also down by half a million listeners as compared to the previous year.
Although Radio 4’s listenership decreased by half a million year-on-year to 10.8 million, the last quarter reported more listeners as compared to the previous quarter. BBC’s Radio 2, meanwhile, was down to 15.3 million listeners as compared to its last year’s record of 15.5 million listeners.
Overall, BBC’s regional and local radio stations reported a weekly reach of a little less than 9 million listeners, which was lower than the 9.3 million it recorded in 2013.
