The BBC's internet radio audience grew by 25 per cent last month after the relaunch of its radio player tool.

The number of people using BBC Radio online actually fell by 260,000 from January's record-breaking 7 million listeners, but the number of on-demand downloads shot up by nearly 2 million to a total of 9 million requests.

Radio 4's soap the Archers and Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles remained the most popular shows. Black music station 1Xtra attracted record traffic thanks to its coverage of the Trinidad carnival.

The BBC's podcasting experiment recorded 270,000 downloads since the trial was launched four months ago. Three shows are available as podcasts, which download directly to the users desktop as soon as the MP3 audio files are published on the site.

FiveLive's Fighting Talk, Radio 4's In Our Time and urban music show TX Unlimited are all being podcast as part of the trial.

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