Cake eating

When you get a bigger a cake, nearly everyone can get a bigger share. That's what's happened with radio listening in the first three months of this year - and the spinners have been out overnight, with the RAJAR figures released at midnight for the first time, to get more newspaper coverage.

There are 46.5m radio listeners in the UK, reaching 90.6% of the measured population - the highest figure since the current research method was introduced in 1999. The headline "winner" was 6Music, boosted from 695,000 listeners to 1,023,000. But remember the BBC conundrum - The Trust said 6Music should be more popular to survive, but the Executive said that growing audiences were a risk - what if it got TOO popular ? And, strategically for Tim Davie, the BBC increasing its overall share - to 56.6%, compared with commercial radio's 41.3% - is not what his advisers want.

In other big name winners, Chris Evans built on Terry Wogan's farewell figures of 8.1m, to 9.53m. But the bigger cake allowed Chris Moyles to crow too, up to 7.88m from 7.24m. BBC Local Radio did well in the snow, overall up 2.4% year on year, and within that, Hereford & Worcester was up a third, Cumbria up a quarter. Even BBC London was back above the half million mark. LBC's big story this time was a year on year improvement of 44% for the medium wave service of traffic and rolling news. There's a mixed picture for the big commercial networks - Galaxy good, Gold mixed, Absolute unsteady. In smaller stations, Yorkshire Radio and Signal (in Staffordshire and Cheshire) have made significant gains.

The debate about 6Music and other BBC stations seems largely to have helped some rivals. NME Radio is up 30%, to 226,000 listeners. Panjab Radio has trebled its audience to 172,000, and Kismat Radio in London is up 50% to 131,000. But the BBC's Asian Network has stood still.

Mark Damazer can still feel pleased as he winds down - Radio 4 is back above 10m year on year, and BBC Radio 7 has broken through the 1m barrier. Station of the Year boss Adrian Van Klaveren will be delighted with 6.5m for Five Live - especially as Talksport saw a slight drop year on year to 2.3m. Even my old chums at the BBC World Service notched up a 5% rise in UK listening year on year.