Lauren Laverne and Guy Garvey return most popular digital crown to BBC 6 Music

6 Music’s audience increased to a record 2.2m listeners, narrowly ahead of BBC Radio 4 Extra

Lauren Laverne (Getty Images)

Record audience figures for Lauren Laverne and Guy Garvey, the Elbow singer, helped BBC 6 Music regain its crown as the UK’s most-listened to digital station.

6 Music’s audience increased to a record 2.2m listeners, narrowly ahead of BBC Radio 4 Extra, which previously held the top digital spot and now has an audience of 2.1m, Rajar figures showed.

Lauren Laverne’s 6 Music morning show now has 875,000 listeners whilst the audience for Garvey’s weekend show has soared by more than 25 per cent over the past year to reach 333,000.

Steve Lamacq's 6 Music weekday show is the station’s most popular with 1,080,000 listeners, and Shaun Keaveny rakes in 976,000.

Chris Moyles secured 300,000 listeners upon his return to the airwaves with his new breakfast show on Radio X, formerly XFM – however those figures are for London only and exclude digital listeners.

Nick Grimshaw appeared unaffected by competition from his Radio 1 predecessor, adding 100,000 listeners to his audience and recording a total of 6.37 million listeners per week, including those aged 10 and above.

Radio 1 said its YouTube channel, a key element in its strategy to reach a young audience, now receives an average of 1.25 million views a day.

The Chris Evans Breakfast Show on Radio 2 has 9.4 million listeners, some 1.3m more than Terry Wogan enjoyed when the late broadcaster handed over the programme.

Radio 4’s audience rose to just under 11m boosted by a strong performance by The Today Programme and Desert Island Discs.

Figures also showed that digital listening in cars grew by 45 per cent year-on-year, to 45m hours, and now account for nearly 20 per cent of all in-car listening. New cars are being fitted with digital radio as standard, bringing a date for switch-off of the analogue signal closer.

Radio 3’s audience was 2.05 million, keeping the classical station ahead of the benchmark 2m mark which it consistently hovers around.