The votes are in, and the winner is ...
Does the public really get what the public wants?
This is not, as you might think, a missive about the local government elections happening across Queensland this weekend. Nor about the byelections in Inala and Ipswich.
It is about another issue close to my heart — radio ratings.
And the first survey of the year, released on Thursday March 14, has crowned B105 king of the world. The station won the overall ratings in audience share, and was no. 1 in the coveted breakfast shift hosted by Stav Davidson, Abby Coleman and Matty Acton.
It’s the latest of many career highlights for Davidson, who has been on air at B105 for 20 years. Now that’s a stat that will surprise many people.
Incidentally, one of Stav’s former co-hosts, Jase (no longer known as Labrat) Hawkins, is also back in the news. Sacked by KIIS last year to make way for the simulcast of Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O into Melbourne, Jase and Lauren Philips have been hired by Nova 100. They’ve stolen the march on Jase’s former friend Kyle, who won’t be on air in Melbourne until April.
The number one spot generally kicks around between B105, Nova 106.9 (with Ash Bradnam, David “Luttsy” Lutteral and Susie O’Neill in brekkie) and Triple M (Greg “Marto” Martin, Margaux Parker and Dan Anstey).
In survey 1, B105 led with 13.8pc of overall available audience and a whopping 15.9 in breakfast, Triple M was second overall (13.2, 13.6) and Nova was third (11.4, 12.4).
So much for the leaders of the pack.
At the other end of the ratings list, it gets a little interesting.
KIIS 97.3, which is usually more competitive with the market leaders, has dropped to 8.2 overall, being beaten by 4BH (9.1). Although streaming and DAB+ have evened the playing field somewhat, it’s unusual for an AM music station to beat an FM one.
Meanwhile, news and talk, which dominate the airwaves in some other markets, seem to be out of fashion big time in Brisbane.
The numbers are especially dire for ABC Brisbane (formerly 612ABC, formerly 4QR) and while 4BC starts the day reasonably strongly, with decent ratings for the breakfast team of Laurel Edwards, Gary Clare and Mark Hine (rating 7.5), and for mornings host Bill McDonald (8.7), it’s got a problem at the back end.
In particular, Drive host Peter Gleeson has sunk to a rating of 4.0. (To be fair, he did outrate ABC Brisbane, which got 2.6 in the same session. This could suggest audience fatigue with talk, or a certain type of talk, at the end of the work day.)
The rumour mill suggests 4BC will be making changes line-up mid-year. If I were making the decisions, I’d take a good hard look at what the Brisbane market really wants. More on that later.
The ABC, which has been on something of a downward spiral in recent times, has had another shocker of a survey despite tweaking its line-up at the start of the year. (No new voices, just new shifts for some of the existing talent.)
Breakfast performed OK with a 6.1 rating, but that was down 1.7 points on the previous survey, and the station only managed 4.0 overall. I’ve not checked back all the way, but some of the daytime shifts must surely have hit, or be very near, all-time low audience numbers.
Not for the first time, ABC Brisbane has rated lower than national youth station Triple J. That’s not supposed to be the way it works.
An informed observer tells me it’s a problem across the board for ABC Local Radio and that the on-air, production and management team in Brisbane “shouldn’t take it personally”.
“It’s up to the new management structure [at head office in Sydney] to work out what the target audience is and what that audience wants and put in place a national strategy and set of program briefs,” my source says.
“For example, go down the NewsRadio path of rolling short sharp segments. BBC local radio breakfast has been like this for years. No music.
“Or do you go the other way and say that people are choosing music, so therefore the ABC should play more music?”
The problem for both the ABC and 4BC could be that people don’t want talk on the radio; they are increasingly going to podcasts for that.
Or it could be that they don’t want the particular talk content that they are being served.
Could be that they are both out of touch with what the people really want.
Could it be that a combination of corporate agendas and inertia — “that’s how we’ve always done it” — have given us a media that’s no longer for the masses, because the masses have moved on?
You want extreme political rants? They’re bigger and better on social media.
You want to frighten people with endless, same-samey coverage of what’s wrong with our community? Maybe you’re better off talking out what’s good and right about our community, and how to realistically address those problems rather than promote unachievable draconian solutions.
Or maybe people just want a laugh and an escape from life as they know it.
Marina Hyde and Richard Osman had an interesting discussion recently on their The Rest is Entertainment podcast centering on the success of Britain’s Channel 5, which is carving out a unique identity and punching well above its weight.
They note that one of its strengths is its agility, in particular its ability to turn around documentaries on issues of public interest — from air fryers to Willy’s Chocolate Experience — very quickly.
Osman and Hyde applauded Channel 5’s program commissioners for their ability to pinpoint topics that people are really talking about, rather than those that network owners and managers think the public should be interested in.
I’ve long posited that the problem with the Australian media — radio and television — is that it follows its own agenda rather than responds to people’s actual interests and concerns.
This was reinforced recently by top-of-the-bulletin news coverage of a meeting in a small suburban venue of about 50 people whose opinions just happened to feed into one of the station’s pet subjects.
A few years ago, I joined a protest march that comprised thousands of people, aged from their teens into their seventies (at least), and yet it got almost no mainstream media coverage.
Go figure.
The media picks and chooses, sometimes for reasons that are against its own interests.
If it’s the ABC, those interests should be to fulfill its charter to provide a service to all Australians — which, while not demanding that they rate no. 1, surely requires them to inform and entertain a substantial audience.
With commercial media (which are public companies), that interest is to make decisions that benefit shareholders — and that means selling airtime to advertisers who want to attract the widest possible audience (or a large number of people in a particular demographic).
In the age of YouTubers, influencers and podcasters, people have lots of places to go to get their news, opinion and entertainment. Especially when it comes to the extreme edges of human interest.
While the huge viewing numbers of yesteryear will never be seen again, there is a way to attract a sizeable audience without being sensational or offensive, or politically partisan.
“Legacy” networks, especially those with the precious gift of broadcast licences, only risk being left behind completely if they allow it to happen.
Disclosure: I worked at 4BC in 2021-22, and was paid to attend a half-day workshop at the ABC in 2023. Over the years, I have been a guest on most Brisbane radio stations.