The sounds coming from the State's radio stations yesterday weren't just the usual summer diet of tired pop music and laboured current affairs. Alert listeners would also have picked up a vainglorious chorus of self-congratulation as station bosses and their PR scriptwriters picked through the JNLR/MRBI numbers. And all somehow managed to find reasons to be cheerful.
Typically, these boasts are based on a combination of selective reading, wishful thinking and the tyranny of petty differences. Thus marginal improvements in some figures for, say, Today FM, Lyric FM and Dublin's FM 104 are celebrated in press releases; meanwhile, there's little sign of the research's more worrying numbers, such as a recent slight setback in audience-reach figures for Dublin's Lite FM, or the decline of RTE Radio 1 and 2FM in the capital.
In reality, these figures are undramatic, underlining the continuing dominance of the two big RTE stations and also the mostly robust state of local radio. Their most eager readers will probably be programmers at the new commercial stations due on the scene shortly in both Cork and Dublin.
In Cork, the forthcoming pop-based Red Hot FM faces the substantial obstacle of one of the State's most powerful and popular local stations, 96FM County Sound - its 52 per cent market share knocks lumps off both RTE Radio 1 and 2FM.
In Dublin, the situation is far more segmented. Country music station Star FM is expected on air in the autumn, with youth-oriented Spin FM not far behind it, while speech-based News Talk FM still crawls toward the start line. They're entering a market where easylistening Lite FM, launched last year, has made a substantial impact on all the existing stations and now has a 10 per cent market share, though its reach seems to have settled down after an initial period when it seemed to be oozing from every speaker in the city.
Many of the boasting stations are happy to take advantage of audience confusion about the difference between "reach" and "share". For example, Today FM cited "reach" figures showing gains for a number of programmes, meaning the punters surveyed were more likely to say they had tuned in to those programmes at some stage on a particular day.
However, Today FM's "share" of listenership - the hard number that indicates how many minutes listeners are staying at a particular station - remains stuck at 8 per cent; and, bad news for a daytime pop station, its appeal remains predominantly male.
Before its TV publicity campaign began, Lyric FM had achieved only a 1 per cent share of daytime listening, rising to 4 per cent after 7 p.m. The classical station's figures are higher in Dublin, but the most recent six-month statistics still show only a 6 per cent "reach" in the capital - that is, just 50,000 Dublin listeners tuning in to Lyric at any stage during the average weekday.
The station's band of begrudgers is still small, but such ratings could increase tension within RTE as a whole, where Lyric gets a fairly big bite of a financial pie that may soon shrink.