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Candle Column: Is It Time To Freshen Up Triple J?   Is it time to freshen up Triple J? In 1990 I started university at Lismore, Northern NSW and studied media with a major in radio. I’d loved everything about radio and I thought it was going be my career. As it turned out I met the likes of Cheyne Gelegin, Anthony Atkinson and Darren Hanlon at uni who changed that path. Throughout the early 90s I hosted many shows on community and college radio (6 months in the US) and worked for two commercial radio stations in Sydney. Last months Candle column was about commercial radio and and how some major record labels rig the charts. When I write these things I write from someone that who has had a strong background and knowledge of the industry. I still love radio and think it’s the most exciting, immediate and informative medium there is. But when I see how things as they truly are of course I’m disappointed. I think the state of the Australian commercial radio is appalling. Last month we had a few emails asking about possible solutions. Fundamentally I believe the only way forward is for more commercial and community radio stations to be issued. It’s the most pressing issue for the Australian music scene to be truly vibrant. At the moment only a few major companies own radio licenses. The Federal Government reluctantly sells them off and recently Nova spent over $100 million to obtain a radio license. That’s a lot money especially to just obtain a license. Especially considering radio is a lot cheaper and easier to operate than a TV station or major newspaper. Hopefully when digital radio comes into full operation within the next 10 years radio won’t be so tightly controlled and more opportunities will exist. When I was at university Triple J (government owned national youth station) wasn’t even being broadcast to Lismore at that time. Triple J has had an amazing affect on the Australian music scene in less than ten years. It’s opened the world up to a lot of people that had little media choice and especially those living in regional areas. When JJJ went totally national in the early 90’s (originally it had existed in Sydney starting in the late-70’s) there was a lot of upheaval - announcers were sacked, rigid playlists became common, and JJJ became a national brand. Huge protests occurred in Sydney at the time because of the changes. Triple J still attracts a lot criticism and a lot of listeners are disenfranchised with the station. Criticisms range from what they play, how many times a day they play things and the announcers becoming personalities and not necessary strong music advocates. I believe Triple J isn’t perfect (but what is?) but it’s made the radio landscape a lot more interesting than it was 10 years ago. Many bands have made careers for themselves thanks to the station. And many more have been heard all around the country enabling bands from region to have more opportunities. Listeners have been offered more choice, choices that commercial radio wouldn’t and couldn’t supply. Some of Triple J’s faults could be improved quite easily. It could vary its playlists, play more music from different bands, not be as repetitious and playing album tracks not just the singles the record companies give them. Triple J could be more of a music leader (something 3RRR in Melbourne and many community stations do) by playing things sooner rather than later. Let commercial radio to play catch up. Really simple things. The problem the station has at the moment is lots of its audience is aging and are not being catered to as a new younger generation comes through. For an audience that no longer enjoys Triple J the options are limited. It’s a difficult problem for any business or organization to cater to its core base but then move with the times. In 1994 I interviewed Barry Chapman who at the time was Triple J’s station manager at the time. Chapman was brought in from Triple M (Australian commercial radio network) to take Triple J from Sydney to the rest of the country. The interview was for On The Street (a now defunct Sydney music paper) and the paper received the most amount of reader correspondence it had ever gotten over one article. The response was 50/50, those who thought I was being too pro-JJJ and the others anti-JJJ. I guess I got the balance right. Chapman was renowned to be difficult and it took many requests to obtain an interview, something Triple J management rarely does. At a time when many people think it’s time for Triple J to change or at least become more innovative again, I thought I’d publish the article again. Some of its content is out-of-date but the broader issues are still relevant. Does the station stick to older experienced management and it’s formulaic playlists? Or choose people to run and program the station that reflect its listenership and a formula that doesn’t ape commercial radio? Some senior management who have been there a long time still remain. People like Stuart Matchett and Arnold Frolows the fifty-something music programmer (who was there at the start of 2JJ in the 70’s, went away to work for Virgin in London and then came back) are still there. It’s not a question of whether Triple J is necessary or not, it’s whether it could be better and pioneering like it once was. Since Triple J has gone national, its attracted a large audience over 25. How can it cater for a younger audience when it’s appealing to people 25 plus? Traditionally Triple J, Double J, has always had a strong 25 plus audiences. And I don’t think someone changes from the age of 22 to 26. The listernership suggest that the radio station is and has been depending on the market, strong 16 through to 34. When you look at the 25 to 39 figure its strength is probably the low end of 30’s. Although that’s change as well because audiences are getting bored with commercial radio stations delivering the classic hits. All of a sudden just because you’re 37 or 38, doesn’t mean you don’t like the music anymore. But you position yourself as a youth network? And we are! We play the newest music that’s made for a young audience, that’s what we do. We can’t help if it an older audience decides they want to come to us because they like it as well. What the older audiences likes about us is its intelligence, its comedy, its issues, its talkback. Those types of things are not just embraced by a younger audience, but an older audience as well. One of the regular complaints about Triple J is its repitition. Why isn’t there more diversity in playing things like album tracks instead of repititive singles? How diverse do you think we should be? How many tracks do you think we play a week? It’s the perception versus the reality! What you have to take into account is listener patterns. There used to be a mentality in this radio station that I absolutely objected to. People said they supported Australian music and I said bullshit, you don’t support Australian music. You play it for two weeks and then stop playing it, that is not support. The bottom line is the vast majority of the audience do not even get to know or hear who the artists are. You’ve got to use rotation to actually get it through to the audience. Take Pearl Jam for example. We heard ‘Daughter’ a lot, but why isn’t there more scope for album tracks to be played? Well we do, we do. If you look at the current playlist there will be four or five Pearl Jam tracks in there. ‘Daughter’ will stick out because it’s the single and everybody knows it and it will be picked up by the other radio stations as well. What happens with our format is because it’s so broad those hit singles stand out more. If you’re looking at the breadth of our playlist, each week there’s 250 tracks. On top that there’s the announcers choice of two tracks an hour. So the announcers do have a choice? Well the music that you hear on the station is a combination of their choice and the Music Director’s choice. They go to the music meetings and make the decisions on what we play. So it’s not one person making a decision on how we should sound. How can your music programmer Arnold Frolows, who’s a generation older than most of the audience, relate to a younger audience, its trends and what they say? Because it’s not just his job. He will set with the program team the overall direction but the way the music meeting works is Michael Tunn who is 19, or Helen Razor in her early 20’s, are putting their point of view forward. It’s not one person. If we relied on one person to do the music then we would sound like Triple M. Why isn’t there a younger person in that main job? So you just throw out someone who has signed some of the most significant artists in the world, who has played a major role in the shape of the radio station because all of a sudden they’ve hit an age, they’re at their use by date? What, he doesn’t know anymore? How do you test that the Triple J Music Director is in touch or not? I would say quite clearly he and the team that works with him are pretty well in touch. Why, because 1.5 million 16 to 34 year olds make the decision to listen to this radio station. And it’s not be by being commercial, but by being diverse and having different people on the air. You can’t not do that unless you’re in touch. There are a few exceptions, but most of the announcers are at the top of the audience age group. Why not younger announcers? We’re bringing younger ones in. You see there you go! If we go the other way and say we will chuck all these people off the air, then we would go through the furore that happened four years ago, when we took people that had been sitting in the radio station for fifteen years. What we’re doing now is bringing Michael Tunn in and building him, we took Francis out of Melbourne, Paul out of Sydney and Catriona Rowntree. There’s a whole group of people that have come through the radio station and learnt their trade. Razor for mine is one of the best announcers I’ve heard on the radio, she’s got this touch that very few have got. They’re the ones that are going to the radio station in the future. Rather than go for ‘I’m sorry you’re 34 now we better take you off air you’re a bit old.’ Another regular complaint about Triple J is that new bands, unsigned bands are not getting airplay? We recorded 250 Australian bands last year for broadcast. We continue to play them, we continue to record them, every day, every week. Unsigned, signed, the entire gammut. What about a demo show? Well it sounds like shit radio. I mean in the end a lot of what we do and what we record are like demos anyway. But what we look for is production quality because we’re looking for a good sounding radio station. We don’t want to run an hour of radio that sounds substandard. People would turn it off. I mean if you look at the history of the demo show that has been on this station, in the main people don’t listen to it. Our worst performed night time program is the Australian Music Show, yet it plays the newest bands. For bands that are not getting Triple J airplay, how can they? By making good records. By keeping in touch with what we do and finding the ways into the system. Talking to people, I mean we have people in every state. There’s programs that need material. It‘s just about finding a way in. We are not a huge organisation, it’s a very small team of people trying to cover the country. What about Triple J supporting tours? You’re presenting bands like ’Pavement’ on one hand, than also an act like ‘The Badloves’ which is very much in the commercial radio domian. We broke The Badloves, there’s nothing wrong with that. The other radio stations didn’t want to know about them. We were there weeks and months before everybody else. So we will support them, it’s just Australian music. I won’t get into the this ones cool and this ones not. I hope in many respects we’ve gone a long way past that. We used to discriminate against some Australian artists for reasons I could never understand. Does Triple J listen and act on comments and criticisms from the public? We monitor all our calls that come in, so we know what the public is saying about what we do. We read the press, we know what people are writing about us. We try to figure out if people are dealing with perceptions and reality. Do you think Triple J has a perception problem? In certain quarters, yeah. But I think in terms of our mass audience, no. It goes through transitions. You’ve got an audience that’s been with us for a long period of time who maybe tiring of the radio station. And you’ve got a new audience who are coming to us saying this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. by Chris Crouch Published December 2001 Feedback: 'This confirms a belief that I've long since held... that if you are making music that is less than big-budget hi-fi you probably won't get the same amount of airplay as say commercially signed/recorded bands. Which is wrong because Triple j has a responsibility, in calling themselves the national youth broadcaster to play good music whether it may not have the high production values that your average major label band has. grrr!' - Leigh, Sydney 'Having left Australia for a 12 month tour of the world and being that I'm now in Denmark on the fifth month of said tour, I thought the JJJ debate sort of pointless. No matter what can be said about JJJ, it still remains an important outlet for new music. Yes, it does sound like any commercial station, not only in Oz but the world and yes, it probably does play too much of what is deemed 'in' by the powers that be but sometimes, just sometimes, JJJ causes certain things to be 'in' at the time. I remember first listening to JJJ in '91 in Perth when it still was a progressive station, far more so than now, and being completely blown away by the quality of, not only the shows and presenters but the diversity of the music. Now those days are over but there still remains a place for JJJ - even if they don't truly break bands anymore. They still remain the only national broadcaster able to push bands that might not normally get a hearing (the Lucksmiths and Darren Hanlon to name just two) and, after months of radio one in Britain, you kind of forget how lucky we are in Australia to have such a station. JJJ may suck at times but at least it's ours.' - David Jeffrey 'I would just like to say that having lived in London for 9 months, I really do miss JJJ, and all that it does do for Aussie artists. The radio stations here are really bad, and the equivalent of JJJ, XFM, is terrible. They continually play the same songs all the time, and in the space of two hours, you will start to hear the same playlist again. Admittedly, JJJ have obviously changed their target market, and now attract a much younger crowd than when they first started. Then again, they are meant to be a youth network. It is hard to say whether they have 'sold out' though. Over the years JJJ, has done so much for Aussie music. The unearthed competition is a fine example, and as every knows, it was this that lead to Grinspoon and Killing Heidi being as big as they are today.' - Colette 'I think comments regarding triple j abandoning its roots are well founded, but at the same time are somewhat unreasonable. Obviously the station has its roots, which were great, but things change. It is now competing with stations like NOVA, which, to some extent, are positioning themselves between triple m and the j's. These stations are picking up a lot of the artists only the j's would previously play, so in my opinion the comments that the j's shouldnt support 'commercial' artists dont cut it. At the same time I want to hear more album tracks, and a little more rotation too. I also feel that the j's are too eager to keep supporting artists who were once at least a little progressive and new, but no longer warrant airplay: eg No Doubt's latest. However in the current funding situation the station has no choice but to appeal to a range of audiences, and being the only national station with a hint of a progressive attitude, listeners with a range of musical tastes (indie/lo-f! i/metal/goth/punk/rap/hip hop/pop/dance/electronica) are all going to listen to the j's as their only real option, and complain when they dont get what they want. It simply isnt possible with the commercial nature of radio to give a station to everyone. I guess my real message is, it aint perfect, but i dont see a better option.' - Rob