BBC Radio 3 audience crashes by 11.4%

Latest RAJAR figures for UK radio audiences report that the BBC Radio 3 audience dropped by a whopping 11.4% year on year. This was a loss of 233,000 listeners from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025. Average hours per listener were also down, by 4.9% to 7.7. (Elsewhere, in an attempt to boost Radio 3 and talk down the loss, R3 presenter Norman Lebrecht compares the latest quarter - Q3 2025 - with the previous quarter - Q2 2025. As any industry insider knows, this is a meaningless comparison as radio audiences vary substantially by season. Most importantly Q3 audience is always boosted by Proms listeners compared to Q2.) 

This dismal performance comes as no surprise. It was inevitable that Radio 3's strategy of aping Classic FM would result in short term gain followed by the long term pain which is starting to emerge. Classical radio - and classical music in general - needs to build a strong franchise of a loyal audience that is prepared to be challenged. BBC Radio 3 in its present form, like its role model Classic FM, totally fails to do this. 

Radio 3 is now just another entertainment station fighting for the floating 'middle of the road' audience. Audience figures for both BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM will keep going up and down as listeners churn across the numerous MOR radio stations. So let's stop pretending that this is doing the future prospects of classical music as an artform any good at all. Classical music is about art, not about entertainment. As Carl Nielsen told us: 

'The right of life is stronger than the most sublime art, and even if we reached agreement on the fact that now the best and most beautiful has been achieved, mankind thirsting more for life and adventure than perception, would rise and shout in one voice: give us something else, give us something new, indeed for Heaven's sake give us rather the bad, and let us feel that we are still alive, instead of constantly going around in deedless admiration for the conventional'.

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