Despite today's full-page advertisements and yesterday's news headlines, the latest radio listenership figures show there has been no dramatic shift since last year.
While other broadcast media are experiencing significant changes in audience profile and numbers, this year's JNLR (Joint National Listenership Research) figures compiled by MRBI show that Ireland has a stable - and predictable - radio market.
The big news last year was that RTE had lost its dominance to local radio. This year the figures are the same and confirm that the loss of market share, which was so public and painful for the station, is not just a statistical blip but a new reality for the public service broadcaster.
RTE's radio stations have a market share of 49 per cent while the independents, which include local radio and Today FM, have 51 per cent.
Some of RTE's old reliables have taken a slight knocking. Marian Finucane's audience is 389,000, a loss of 6,000 listeners, while Pat Kenny at 339,000 is also down 6,000 listeners.
While the losses are not large in themselves - certainly an advertiser would not be bothered by them - they are part of a downward trend for the two broadcasters which began in earnest last year. Joe Duffy has settled into the Liveline slot and has increased his audience by a significant 33,000 to 311,000.
Morning Ireland at 451,000 continues to attract the biggest audience for any programme on the station. As the only news/talk radio programme at that hour of the morning, it has increased its audience by 13,000, showing the public's appetite for early news. By comparison on Today FM, Ian Dempsey's Breakfast Show with 152,000 listeners draws only a fraction of the listeners.
The figures confirm that RTE Radio 1 is broadcasting to an ageing audience. Only 8 per cent of its listeners comes from the 20-24 age group while the largest group at 52 per cent is 65 years of age or older. To counterblance this, 48 per cent of 2 FM's audience comes from this category but it suggests that there is increasingly little in RTE's talk format which appeals to early twenty somethings.
An equally serious concern for the national broadcaster has to be the Dublin bias in the figures. In Dublin RTE Radio 1 has 40 per cent of the market while nationally it has 27 per cent. That's good news for local radio stations but bad news for RTE.
In Dublin, 98 FM and FM 104 battle it out for the music listening youth market and, while both stations have lost listeners in this survey (about 50,000 between them), they have significant market share and dominate the 7 p.m. to midnight slot. Between them the two independents have 62 per cent of the market compared with 2 FM's tiny 6 per cent.
Ireland is highly radio friendly - 89 per cent of the respondents in the JNLR/MRBI survey claim to have listened to the radio the previous day and despite the medium being popularly regarded as "the housewives' choice" slightly more listeners are men than women.
In theory that's good news for Today FM which, as well as increasing its market share by 1 per cent to 8 per cent, has an audience profile of twice as many men as women. That's something the station will have to redress urgently if its increase is to appeal to advertisers.
The attraction of Navan man and co is obviously growing, with Eamon Dunphy (and his ever-increasing cast of stand-in presenters ) putting on 9,000 listeners, bringing the total to 151,000. Even at that, the station will still have some work to do if it is to challenge its drive-time competitor, Five-Seven Live, whose listenership has increased to 199,000.
Incidentally, these figures are averaged out over the year and RTE will have to wait until February for the next JNLR bulletin to see how Rachel English has fared in the chair since Myles Dungan left for the new arts show Rattlebag, or, for that matter, how Dungan has done since Mike Murphy left.
RTE's year-old classic music station Lyric, is twice as popular in Dublin as it is anywhere else and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it appeals largely to a 35-plus age group. It seems to have found its niche with 2 per cent (or about 100,000) of market share, the same as last year, and so has not fulfilled the station's target of 3 per cent by the end of 1999.
Furthermore its "listened to yesterday" figure has fallen by 1 per cent to 4 per cent in the past year, which shows that it initially benefited from a high curiosity factor.
Today FM is very much a two-programme station with Ian Dempsey and Eamon Dunphy the big audience pullers. When they go off air, the listenership falls dramatically. In an attempt to enlarge the schedule, Ray D'Arcy has been poached from RTE television to follow Dempsey in the morning.
Lite FM, the new Dublin "easy-listening" station aimed at the over-35s, is too recent an entrant to the market to make it into the survey though its increasing inclusion in advertising rosters would suggest that it is making some headway in the market.