Music and talk programmes from ARD radio broadcasters

The ARD radio statistics (ARD-Hörfunkstatistik) shows the airtime of radio stations of nine state-level ARD broadcasters, the federal broadcaster Deutschlandradio and the international broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

In 2022, music programmes accounted for 63% of the total programme of the state-level broadcasters: 18.8 million of 29.8 million airtime minutes were music programmes. For Deutschlandradio, the share of music was significantly lower; here, general culture and education programmes are strongly represented (30% of airtime).

There were no peculiar changes in the share of music in the overall programme output of ARD radio programmes for several years. Most recently, however, there were noteworthy developments with regard to the airtime designated as classical music: While their share of the total programme output in 2021 was slightly above the level of previous years at 11.8%, their share in 2022 fell to 9.9%, the lowest value in the period under review since 2006. In absolute figures, this represents a decline of around 564,000 broadcast minutes (2021: 3,519,760 minutes, 2022: 2,956,000 minutes). In contrast, the share of broadcast minutes designated as light music in the overall programme rose from 16.2% in 2021 to 17.8% in 2022. Rock and pop music continues to account for a quarter of the total airtime of ARD radio programmes.

It is also noticeable that ARD's exclusively digital radio formats, which were included in the radio broadcasting statistics from 2016 to 2018, weighted rock and pop music and light music somewhat more heavily.

In 2022, Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk (SWR) broadcast most rock and pop music (1.8 million minutes). Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) broadcast the most minutes of light music programmes in 2022 (1.2 million). While in 2021, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb), Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) each broadcast more than 500,000 minutes of classical music, only BR remained broadcasting more than half a million minutes of classical music in 2022.

Hinweis

The figures listed above are based on data collected by the relevant broadcasting corporations as part of the ARD’s radio statistics (ARD-Hörfunkstatistik). The individual radio programmes of the state-level broadcasters included in the radio statistics have no longer been listed since 2019. Based on the airtime data it can be concluded that since then only those ARD radio programmes are considered that are broadcast terrestrially in addition to digital transmission. This does exclude ARD radio programmes that are exclusively transmitted digitally – data on digital radio are available only for the years 2016 to 2018. For reasons of uniform presentation, data for the exclusively digitally transmitted radio programme Deutschlandfunk Nova are therefore not included in this presentation of Deutschlandradio (DLR).

It should also be noted that all six categories Rock and pop, Light music and Classical music as well as the Culture and education, Entertainment and Service and information have both music and talk shares. The „total share of music“ listed therefore does not correspond to the airtime minutes of the three music categories.