Media Release: 29 October 2008

Commercials in denial about Community Radio audience

Over 9.5 million Australians listen to community radio every month.  Over 4.5 million are regular weekly listeners.

But commercial broadcasters seem to want to pretend this significant audience doesn’t exist, with Commercial Radio Australia CEO, Joan Warner saying they've chosen to ignore the latest listener results for community broadcasters.

“It’s not a surprise that commercial radio doesn‘t want to hear that more and more people are tuning in to community broadcasters”, says President of the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA), Deborah Welch. “These results make it clear that the surveys they refer to as ‘the official surveys’ are not providing the full picture, given they don’t truly include community broadcasters.”

The commercial ratings surveys carried out by Nielsen Media Research (NMR) do not explicitly mention community broadcasters in either the survey or the results.

NMR surveys use diaries which list only the subscribing commercial and ABC stations that are in each market in order to obtain their information. However, if a respondent listens to a non-listed station, they have to tick the quarter-hour(s) under the “other AM/FM” heading. There is no “prompt” of individual stations. Any listening to community radio stations is therefore clearly under-reported in the NMR surveys, because community radio stations are not listed in the diary.

Ms Welch said, “The commercial radio survey presents as if community broadcasters aren’t there, and then hopes that people don’t remember to mention them. Whereas the McNair Ingenuity Research actually asks people about their community radio listening, so it is a far more accurate reflection of people listening. So we know that over 9.5 million Australians are listening to community radio every month”

“These results are important for listeners, supporters, government and sponsors to know and understand.  They reinforce the popularity of community radio and underline the importance of community radio stations having equal access to spectrum in both analogue and digital broadcasting”.

The McNair Ingenuity Community Radio Listenership Survey results were released earlier this month at Parliament House and showed an increase from 47% of Australians (aged 15+) listening to community radio every month in 2006, to 57% in 2008

For full details of the survey, visit www.cbonline.org.au