BBC Radio 4 is celebrating a year on year boost in listeners, with radio listening figures showing the station is continuing to inch towards the 10 million mark it last reached in spring 2003.
The speech station has posted an annual rise of 3.2 per cent up to 9.48m listeners, compared with 9.19 last year. But the station is marginally down quarter on quarter – falling 1.6 per cent in the past three months.
Quarterly radio listening figures from Rajar show the station’s flagship breakfast show, the Today programme, increased its listeners to 6.18m compared with 5.87mn last year.
Meanwhile, BBC Radio Five Live has seen an annual dip of 2.4 per cent – pulling in 5.9m listeners, compared with last year which saw the World Cup boost listening figures to 6.03m.
Its breakfast show audience is marginally up year on year at 2.29m, but down on the quarter.
FiveLive’s digital-only sister station FiveLive Sports Extra, saw a massive boost of 31.6 per cent – up to 867,000 listeners compared with last year’s figure of 658,000.
The BBC’s digital-only speech station, BBC7, also saw success with figures increasing 10.5 per cent to 738,000.
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