Live focus pays off as R1 figures soar: festival coverage and Chris Moyles's breakfast show push BBC station up the Rajar ratings.(Radio)

A record-breaking summer of live music in the UK has helped lift Radio One to its best Rajars performance in four years.

Boosted by coverage of the likes of the Reading and Leeds festivals plus its own live events, the network added 100,000 listeners in the three months to the end of September to take its audience to 10.3m. Breakfast host Chris Moyles alone added another 300,000 listeners to his slot, while in London he finished ahead of both 95.8 Capital FM's Johnny Vaughan and Heart 106.2's Jamie Theakston for the first time.

For Radio One controller Andy Parfitt the figures are proof that it is possible for new and live music which the BBC's unique funding status allows it to cover in far greater depth than its commercial rivals--to be the basis of a genuinely populist radio station.

"Part of our remit is to focus on new music, and there are plenty of examples of us doing that," says Parfitt. "There were the Reading and Leeds festivals, we took DJs round the country, we covered Franz Ferdinand at the Scala. It's a public service mix and I'm delighted the ratings are fantastic."

Despite Radio One's gains, Radio Two remains the nation's favourite music station, although ratings are down slightly. It has slipped 0.5 percentage points against the same period last year and lost 200,000 listeners, but the station's head of talent Lewis Carnie says it is absolutely where it needs to be in terms of ratings.

"Our target isn't ratings--it's to produce the greatest variety of music for our listeners that we can," he says. But Carnie expects the recent introduction of Chris Evans, whose shows are not covered in the latest Rajars, to bring about a boost to the figures. "I think it'll make quite a bit of difference to the weekends," he says. "He's a great presenter with a strong female appeal."

For the London stations, there was massive volatility for the second quarter in a row, with Capital slipping from first to third among commercial broadcasters and Chrysalis Radio's Heart climbing to number one in both share and reach, offering a convincing justification for the decision to introduce Jamie Theakston to its breakfast schedule. Emap's Magic 105.4 also saw strong growth.