XFM: The great switch-off

Bloody hell, no wonder the team at XFM panicked and brought back daytime presenters: the experiment of dumping DJs has caused the station to tank, mislaying 40% of its audience year-on-year, according to today's audience stats.

The trouble for XFM is that its audience is younger, smarter and more plugged in to the web - having persuaded a couple of hundred of thousand of them to look elsewhere for entertainment, it's going to be virtually impossible to tempt them back.

Still, at least the hollowing out of the XFM audience has spared its 'flagship' sister station the humiliation of being overtaken by the indie-snits down the corridor. Capital is continuing to do badly - the Vaughan-Van Outen breakfast show now languishes behind Magic and Heart. Capital MD Paul Jackson is insisting that it's still "early days" for the new schedule, although since Van Outen popped up on the station back in February it doesn't really seem all that early in the day. Perhaps Jackson has a different concept of "early" to the rest of us. Maybe he thinks getting up at Noon is "early to rise." If he does get up at midday, it would explain why he thinks the Vaughan-VanOuten breakfast show is a good idea, I suppose.

More worryingly for Capital, it's now having its arse kicked by Kiss:

Kiss had 1.58 million listeners, the first time it has had a bigger audience than Capital [on 1.56m], although its audience share of 4.3% is behind the GCap Media station's 4.6%.

Nationally, both Moyles and Wogan had record audiences at breakfast and Radio 1 has broken the 11 million barrier - the first time since back when Sara Cox was doing breakfasts.