MUMBAI: The BBC has announced that its radio services in the UK are growing in popularity. Nearly seven million unique British users visited its radio websites in January.

This marks a year-on-year increase of 70 per cent and the highest ever for BBC Radio.

Listeners heard a record 4.2 million hours of radio on-demand, with digital-only services spearheading the increase: 1Xtra, 6 Music, Asian Network and BBC 7 all reported record on-demand listening, totalling 1.2 million hours.

6 Music saw record online listening, with a combined live and on-demand total topping half a million hours. Asian Network's Top 40 Soundtracks vote pushed weekly unique users of the network's site over 60,000 for the first time in early January. 1Xtra gave another impressive performance with more than 500,000 hours of online listening and 70,000 on-demand requests for the M1X Show.

For January 2005 Radio 4's The Archers attracted 456,975 users. The same station's show I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue got 252,618 users.