The BBC will no longer attempt to increase its share of the total radio audience and instead strive to reach younger listeners who prefer streaming music and podcasts, according to its director of education and radio.

James Purnell said the BBC was facing an existential threat because young people spent more time watching Netflix than BBC terrestrial TV or iPlayer, and preferred to listen to music using services such as Spotify than on the corporation’s stable of radio stations.

The BBC is increasingly aware that it needs to prove the value of the £150.50 annual licence fee to younger Britons who are used to streaming commercial content on their laptops and smartphones.

In a speech to the European Broadcasting Union, Purnell said the BBC was for everyone. “Everyone benefits because everyone pays. And everyone pays so everyone must benefit.”

He said he no longer cared about Rajars - the industry measure of radio audience numbers - and said BBC Radio’s objective was to retain its existing listeners while reaching new audiences in different ways.

Purnell warned that tough competition from commercial radio groups, such as Global, which owns Classic FM and Heart, or Bauer, which controls the Absolute and Magic brands, could result in stations scoring short-term victories “while we all lost the war”.

“Rather than focus on how big our slice of the pie is, we should grow its overall size, we should get more people listening to radio and podcasts,” he said.

Purnell – who was a Labour minister in Gordon Brown’s government – urged the media regulator, Ofcom, to drop rules on the number of hours allocated to different genres on BBC radio networks. Instead, he wants the corporation to be judged by the number of people it reaches.

Overall listenership to speech radio has remained steady in the UK while the market for podcasts has expanded rapidly, especially among younger listeners who are less likely to listen to the radio in cars.

The BBC dominates the British podcast market, with a third of listeners finding their favourite downloads on the corporation’s website, according to the most recent report by Ofcom. This has raised concerns among some independent producers that the corporation’s success is blocking the development of a commercial UK podcast industry.

Purnell said the shift away from traditional television to streaming services was “beyond the tipping point” and the BBC was attempting to catch-up by modernising its iPlayer service.