New radio station out of tune with listeners

Star-studded newcomer Radio Live has been the big loser in the latest battle for the airwaves.

The latest radio ratings show Radio Live fell from 116,000 listeners nationwide in the November survey, to 104,000 for the past six months.

Radio Live was launched with a massive marketing campaign and a high-profile line-up of presenters in April last year. But it has failed to capture talkback's imagination, falling behind niche stations like Radio Sport and George FM.

Auckland's leading station, Newstalk ZB, has 423,100 listeners, four times as many as Radio Live.

In Auckland, the main battleground, Radio Live was stagnant, falling slightly from 2.1 per cent of listeners to 2 per cent. In Wellington the network pulled in only 1.9 per cent of listeners. The top two stations in the capital are ZM and Newstalk ZB, followed closely by The Breeze.

In the highly competitive Auckland breakfast market, Paul Holmes is still the king with his Newstalk ZB show, with 19.6 per cent of the commercial market, followed by Classic Hits 97.4FM with 8.7 per cent, Mai FM88.6 with 6.3 per cent, and ZM 91.0 with a 6.2 per cent share.

Brent Impey, chief executive of CanWest, which owns Radio Live, said he was delighted with the figures as the target was 80,000.

"We were really pleased with Radio Live's performance. We were celebrating long into the night last night," he told the Herald on Sunday.

In better news for CanWest, More FM jumped from a 21 per cent share of Auckland's market to 25 per cent.

Nationwide, Newstalk had 12.6 per cent of the market.

It was followed by The Edge network with 409,800 listeners and Classic Hits with 383,100. The Rock is in fourth place with 351,200 listeners and ZM was in fifth position with 349,800 listeners each week.

Newstalk led the Auckland market with 13 per cent.

Classic Hits was second with 9.7 per cent audience share, from 8.9 per cent in the last survey.

Maori and Pacific station Mai FM held on to its increasing audience with 7.6 per cent. The station jumped from 5.2 per cent last April to 7.5 per cent in November.

The lucrative national breakfast audience was also dominated by Newstalk with 17.2 per cent, similar to its 17.3 per cent rating in November. Classic Hits followed with 10.2 per cent, The Rock and More FM on 8.9 per cent and The Edge on 8 per cent.

The six-week survey sampled 17,013 people 10 years and over. The margin of error was 0.75 per cent.