RAJAR ..
.. are bad lads. RAJAR stands for Radio Joint Audience Research (I don't know where that extra A has gone either). They have listenership figures for all the radio stations in Britain. I need these listenership figures for my dissertation. In Ireland these listenership figures are gathered by the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) and are called Joint National Listenership Research (JNLRs). The lovely Andrew in BCI is incredibly helpful, and invited me to their offices to have a look at the figures myself. There's no charge, you know. It's free.
RAJAR, on the other hand, want me to pay
The problem, as usual, is the nasty British habit of privatising everything. The BCI is a public body and a very good choice for collecting listenership data. But RAJAR is a private company set up by the BBC and the Commercial Radio Companies Assocation.
Why? Why do you need a private company to do that? Why not Ofcom? Having Ofcom collect the information would be the sensible course of action. For a start they wouldn't go charging me loads of money, but also I think that listenership figures should be in the public domain. You .. actually we (I pay the BBC licence fee too!) pay for the BBC, we should be able to find out how many people listen to BBC radio if we want to. It's called accountability.
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