Radio figures

A couple of things from yesterday's RAJAR figures - first, Smash Hits and The Hits, for long the leading light of commercial national DAB stations, seem to be imploding. Can't help that the magazine title and the TV station the brands are based on are both now defunct.

Second, NME Radio has picked up 3,000 new listeners (or "a margin of error" as statisticians call it) to arrive at 218,000. It's hard to imagine that those are the figures they were hoping for at launch - even in a good advertising environment, you'd be struggling. You wonder if maybe the audience is being held back by a too-mainstream programming policy? The competition is surely Last FM and Spotify, so why battle Absolute Xtreme and XFM?