Listening to the radio in 2009

In a possibly foolish feat of dedication I spent 2009 adding (almost) all of my radio listening to the BBC Radio Labs prototype, Radio Pop. The principle use of Radio Pop is to track online listening, but as most of my listening is done on DAB radios and podcasts I used the manual update feature of Radio Pop every few days to regularly add my listening. You can browse my complete profile at http://www.radiopop.co.uk/users/tristanf. As you can see I mostly listen to BBC Radio 4.

As 2009 is now over I've extracted all this data using the Radio Pop API, some Python scripts and a spreadsheet and this is what I found.

In total I listened to 1021 individual programmes for 633 hours and 17 minutes.



I listened to Radio 4 for 35,140 minutes over 974 individual programmes
I listened to Five Live for 1860 minutes over 31 programmes
I listened to Radio 1 for 417 minutes over 4 programmes
I listened to Radio 3 for 326 minutes over 5 programmes
I listened to Five Live Sports Extra for 228 minutes over 5 programmes
I listened to 6 Music for 24 minutes over 1 programme
I listened to the World Service for 2 minutes over 1 programme

(35,140 minutes is around 586 hours or an entire 24 and a half days listening to Radio 4.)

My top 20 most listened to programmes for 2009 were...

1. Today for 8712 minutes over 215 episodes
2. Saturday Live for 1795 minutes over 32 episodes
3. Any Questions? for 1479 minutes over 30 episodes
4. The Archers Omnibus for 1465 minutes over 20 episodes
5. In Our Time for 1335 minutes over 31 episodes
6. Woman's Hour for 1262 minutes over 22 episodes
7. Afternoon Play for 1041 minutes over 23 episodes
8. Saturday Play for 990 minutes over 15 episodes
9. Broadcasting House for 984 minutes over 18 episodes
10. Kermode and Mayo's Film Review for 960 minutes over 16 episodes
11. Pick of the Week for 927 minutes over 22 episodes
12. Simon Mayo for 900 minutes over 15 episodes
13. Desert Island Discs for 855 minutes over 19 episodes
14. The Archers for 705 minutes over 47 episodes
15. The Now Show for 636 minutes over 22 episodes
16. Front Row for 595 minutes over 22 episodes
17. The News Quiz for 549 minutes over 19 episodes
18. Classic Serial for 540 minutes over 9 episodes
19. Excess Baggage for 420 minutes over 14 episodes
20. Gilles Peterson for 417 minutes over 4 episodes

And then splitting all the listening data per day over the entire year gives the graph at the top of this post. The big gaps every now and then are mainly holidays. The regular cycle of spikes are weekends, when I tend to listen most.

It doesn't quite represent all my listening as I wasn't religious over doing this every day. It certainly misses out some podcasts which I listened to well after the broadcast date (mainly the excellent Thinking Allowed) and it's all BBC, but that's the only radio I listen to anyway. Whilst I was writing this up I discovered Dale Lane's excellent statistics of his TV viewing, which looks much more automated than my data gathering. But ideally we want this automatically aggregated and collated for us, just BBC TV and radio would be good enough for me at first. Obviously internet-connected radios and TV, from Olinda to the Sensia and iPlayer to Project Canvas, have the potential to do this but we'll need large-scale open systems from projects like RadioDNS, NoTube and URIPlay to get us to that personal media informatics utopia.