While Asian radio stations in the UK generally see audiences fluctuate every quarter thanks to quirks of the measurement system, we can still see long term trends over longer periods.

AIM Magazine has put together figures for seven radio stations going back two years to give you a better idea of how the stations are doing.

The figures below only include radio stations that have their audiences measured by the industry body Rajar. Listener numbers are all in thousands.

Kismat and Punjabi radio are owned by Sunrise Radio group.

Not all audiences are measured every quarter. Club Asia Radio’s numbers are updated every 6 months.

It’s also worth remembering there are other quirks. Asian Network is the only station available nationally on DAB digital radio. It has an analogue radio licence only in Birmingham. Sunrise Radio has excellent coverage in London but not the rest of the UK – with its national figures a combination of local digital radio licences in six cities.

Club Asia Radio is only available in London. All the above stations also can be heard on Sky digital (except Club Asia until recently) but those numbers are not explicitly measured by Rajar.

Turning the above figures into a graph, we can get a better understanding of how the stations have done.

The chart illustrates that by and large most of the major Asian stations have trended the same way: a decline for 18 months and then a small rise in listeners over the last six months.

Over the two year period it is Sunrise Radio in London that has lost the most amount of listeners: by nearly 100,000, or a quarter of its audience.

The dip by Asian Network was more pronounced only because it jumped to half a million listeners at a time it had been running a nationwide marketing campaign.