Elisabeth Mahoney on the amazing weirdness of radio-station loyalty

Like most critics, the way I consume the medium I write about – radio – is a warped version of how audiences experience it. I listen with a notepad at all times, go back and listen again, and am decidedly promiscuous with the radio knob. Most listeners do the opposite: they're fiercely loyal to their favourite station and rarely budge. In fact, most listen to just two and a half stations a week (that is, two main stations and one for specific programmes or presenters); a third of listeners never change the station while driving to or from work. The norm is still one radio station listened to all day. I know this from reading some rather dry research papers. But it was in a hospital operating theatre, at 5am one morning, that I fully realised the extent and vehemence of radio station loyalty. My niece was having an emergency caesarean at 27 weeks. I went in with her. Delirious on medication, she talked lots of rambling nonsense until someone switched the radio on, and we heard Patsy Cline singing Sweet Dreams . All of a sudden, she was very focused indeed. "That's Magic," she said, horrified. "I can't have Magic on! Ask them to change it to Choice ." Everyone in the room seemed a bit busy, understandably, so I didn't feel I could ask anyone to switch it over – meaning her son was born to the sound of In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins . He's seven now and we play it every year on his birthday. But she still wouldn't dream of tuning in to Magic. This, in a microcosm, sums up radio listener habits. The fact that such brand and station loyalty still exists – as it evaporates in other media – is a bigger story, really, than the record numbers of radio listeners overall. Such stubborn connections, even as choice proliferates and technology makes pick-and-mix listening a doddle, is radio's real triumph. Its death has so often been predicted, but this persistent, unchanging loyalty is the clearest sign of a medium in astonishingly rude health.