The BBC Radio Newcastle station manager gave a listener figure of 7000 for the folk show in a population of 1.4M. So that was 0.5% of the population of Radio Newcastle catchment areas actually listening. That is a bit lower than Mike Harding's 800,000 listeners in a population of 60M (1.3%). However given that 2M listeners in a total population of 60M (3%) get the whole of Radio 3 provided for their pleasure, 0.5% isn't that small.

I had to smile at the DAB piece in front of the folk item too. Having invested so heavily in DAB, the BBC is obviously feeling quite vulnerable at the recent adoption of the new DAB+ International standard, which will eventually make most existing DAB radios obsolete. The commercial guys are already pressuring Ofcom to support the change her in the UK. The funny thing is of course it that if the BBC did move to DAB+ they could get about twice as many channels on their multiplex and all at higher quality than now, so the capacity for broadcasting more "specialist" music nationwide would be much greater.