Sounding off

I know I'm bad; I look for the gaps in all press releases about BBC Sounds. Today comes another where I feel I'm being misdirected, as the magician removes a dead dove from his sleeve.

No gap in this bit - 56% of listening via BBC Sounds is to live radio. 44% is to programmes that have already been transmitted or to specially-commissioned podcasts. 2.9m people used the service at least once a week, one week in the last quarter. We are not told the average. This is up from a 2.5m peak recorded in the summer. "More than" half a million people aged 16-34 are using BBC Sounds each week. We are not told whether this is an improvement on the old, disdained Radio iPlayer, though the release adds at the bottom "BBC Sounds now has a bigger audience than iPlayer Radio did."  What's the exact size of that improvement, and the total cost of achieving it ?

Brexitcast, we are told, tops the unpublished chart of most popular podcasts, though "The Archers tops the list for on demand plays of our radio programmes amongst all audiences and Radio 4 programmes dominate the chart."

(Let me repeat - one of the grounds for closing iPlayer Radio down in the UK was that it was only reaching 3% of UK citizens aged 16-34. I make that 505,000)