Australia’s only LGBTI+ radio station, JOY Melbourne has posted its third consecutive audience increase, with growth of 19% taking its monthly listenership to 470,000, according to the latest McNair national listener survey.

The survey is conducted regularly for the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia by McNair research.

It is a hybrid telephone and online survey of a representative sample of 15,000 Australians over the age of 15, across all Australian states and territories (more details here). Individual station results are not published in the national survey, however, stations are permitted to release their own results if they wish.

JOY’s breakfast remains its highest rating day part, but the increase in listeners “is coming in through night time speciality programing which concentrate on issues affecting the LGBTI+ community around the world,” according to the station.

Current programming covers everything from rainbow families, to current affairs through to kink and fetish.

JOY program director Chris Tait has told radioinfo: “I am so proud of all of our teams. They are working hard to provide unique and original content for the LGBTI+ communities not just in Melbourne but across Australia. And the more we work on broadening our reach and diversity, the more our ratings increase. It tells me that we are on the right path, it’s great to see so many volunteers on board with JOY’s changing strategy and the listeners are responding as well.”

Since Tait started at JOY in January 2017, JOY has recruited names like Mitchell Coombs with his show Not My Cup of Tea; Tom Walsh from the Logie award winning Gogglebox, who co-hosts the Tom and Warren Breakfast show and winner of Big Brother and former SCA announcer Ben Norris who hosts the nationally syndicated show Word for Word.

JOYs podcast library is also seeing increased audiences surpassing one million total podcast downloads late last year and seeing monthly downloads averaging of 45,000 each month.

The station also recently concluded a successful radiothon, where the station brought in $280,000 – its second highest radiothon figure to date.

• Over a quarter (27%) of Australians aged 15 years and over, or 5,187,000 people, listen to community radio in a typical week.
• Overall, 82% of Australians aged 15 years and over listen to some radio in the course of a typical week.
• The number of Australians aged 15 years and over listening to community radio in an average week has risen from 3,767,000 in 2004 to 5,187,000 in 2017…