RAJAR

From Media UK's The Knowledge. Last update: 18:16, 3 May 2005 by Andrew Garner. Based on work by James Cridland.

RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research Limited) was established in 1992 to operate a single audience measurement system for the radio industry - BBC, UK licensed and other commercial stations. The first RAJAR figures were Q4 1992.

Prior to RAJAR's establishment, JICRAR (Joint Industry Committee for Radio Audience Research) produced commercial radio's audience figures, while internal figures were used for BBC stations. Inevitably, this meant that comparison between the two was not deemed as an accurate reflection of audience listening.

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Criticisms of RAJAR

RAJAR figures are worked out from diaries, self-completed by listeners. A number of problems have been claimed with RAJAR's methodology.

Kelvin MacKenzie, the chief executive of talkSPORT, claims that, since RAJAR relies on the listener remembering which station they'd been listening to. This, he says, results in talkSPORT not getting enough credit for listeners - since many listeners believe that live sports coverage is only available on the BBC. He advocates an alternative electronic measurement system, which showed talkSPORT as having 8.1 million listeners a week (in Jan 2003), in comparison with RAJAR's claimed 2.2 million.

SMG, owners of Virgin Radio, also has publicly expressed concern with their RAJAR figures, concerning under-sampling of key demographics particularly the 25-34 years-old group.

While large stations have fairly static RAJAR figures, with only small swings each survey, supporters of SMG's argument point to some smaller stations, particularly those aimed at 25-34 males, which seem to have much wilder swings. As an example, XFM's share of listening within London in 2003 fluctuated wildly - the four quarterly figures were 1.7%, 1.1%, 2.1%, 1.5%. XFM could reasonably have pointed to the figures for Q2 and Q3, where their figures nearly doubled, and expressed concern. However, XFM was owned by Capital Radio Group who were, according to RAJAR, the market leader with 95.8 Capital FM, and in any case, unlike talkSPORT and Virgin, the figures were not to their detriment.

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