With a little over a week passed since the release of Q3’s radio listening figures, we’ve taken a fine-toothed comb to the data to pick out some nuggets of insight behind the headline figures.

The magic number for the commercial radio industry is their combined share against the BBC, which has held steady at 43% both quarter on quarter and year on year.

Above anything else, the consistency of this figure does a lot to vindicate the much maligned RAJAR diary system for recording radio listening. While we all look forward to the day of electronic measurement, the consistency of results like this gives an assurance of reliability to the current methodology – were the sampling methods unreliable or haphazard, we’d expect significant discrepancies with each new survey.

The 43% share figure hides a meritable 2.14m increase in reach over the last 12 months across all commercial stations, half a million of which has come in the last three months. Despite this, the BBC’s dominance of national FM licenses means they still take a huge share of listening hours through their flagship stations, as the chart below illustrates:

Within this relative inertia, there are some notable winners and losers on the latest survey. In terms of growing both reach and total listening hours, talkSPORT was by some margin the best performer of the last three months - the station added 453,000 new listeners and 4.5m additional hours compared to the previous quarter.

The change in reach chart (below) provides some good symmetry to explain this, with talkSPORT’s chief competitor – BBC Five Live – seeing the greatest loss of listeners. This appears to be a direct result of the loss of two of the BBC’s exclusive live Premiership commentary packages to talkSPORT (the Saturday evening and early Sunday fixtures). As a result, the BBC now holds just four of the seven Premier League broadcast packages.

Away from the big numbers, many of the UK’s smaller, local stations are often lost in the raft of data each RAJAR survey throws up. So, congratulations to Manx Radio and Radio Borders, each of whom reach an otherwise unrivalled 56% of all adults in their transmission areas (honourable mentions too for the other three radio stations to boast over 50% reach within their broadcast footprint – Moray Firth, Channel 103 and 104.7 Island FM).

Credit too to BBC Radio Lincolnshire, whose 107,000 listeners tune in for an average of 18 hours and 12 minutes each week – considerably more than any other surveyed station (Gold Essex and Gold Suffolk follow next with 14 hours 54 minutes each).

Finally, a special mention to the oft-overlooked 107.3 Touch Radio Warwick; the UK’s smallest FM station with a recorded reach of 9,000 listeners, just 13,673,000 shy of BBC Radio 2’s weekly audience.