Jays’ manager Chris Scaddan chats with Peter Saxon about the youth network’s unprecedented success.

On ratings day last week when I spoke to the Content/Program Directors of the three major commercial FM networks, it was less than smiles all ‘round. Of the 24 commercial FM stations in the five major markets only five went up, the other 19 all lost share. Only DMG’s Paul Jackson seemed pleased with the result – Nova had gone up in both Sydney and Melbourne.

These three radio mavens, ARN’s Duncan Campbell, SCA’s Craig Bruce and the aforementioned Paul Jackson offered various explanations for the  apparent listener exodus from the FM band. Most popular theory was that the coming election was driving people to the traditional news stations on the AM band. And while there was general consensus that competition between them had never been tighter, not one them mentioned the incredible survey results for triple j.

triple j increased its audience in all five capital cities while it took out an unprecedented first place – outright – in Perth with a 13.0 share.

“It’s been the first time we’ve been number one in a metro market,” confirms triple j manager Chris Scaddan, “It’s not that rare an occurrence that we might top 18-24s which is, after all, our target audience. But it’s very rare- well it hasn’t happened before – that we’ve been number one overall.”

While Scaddan believes the ratings surge is the result of a long term trend for the jays, others including my fellow editor Steve Ahern contends the election played a part telling Richard Aedy on Radio National that triple j could turn out to have a strong influence on the way that young people vote. Full audio here.

The theory goes that while older commercial FM Music listeners may have drifted to AM Talk for election coverage, younger ones with an interest in politics with their music could  have gone to triple j instead. But Scaddan is not convinced…

“Yeah, maybe… I don’t know. You could maybe theorise about that.” he says, “In all honesty we don’t think in terms of AM or FM. We just do what we do and get it out there. And certainly we work hard to make sure that any sort of talk content that we do, whether it’s on politics or anything is thoroughly researched and well done, but also irreverent and unique in the way that it sounds. So I hope, and I do believe, that we do stand out and sound different to most stations on the dial.”

triple j is not only different but unique in the way that it has been able to stick to their charter of targeting 18-24’s even though it’s been around for almost 40 years.

“We are completely drilled on that 18-24 audience,” says Scaddan. “Its just that constant focus. There’s no thoughts about trying to please an older audience . were trying to please the younger audience which is our core reason for being here.

“All of our editorial content goes through a filter that asks, ‘Does it work for that age group, does it work for young Australians?’ We focus on that completely and it does pay off.

“It’s quite small demographic, only six years of an age group to talk about and think about as to who they are and what they want musically and what stage of their life they’re in. A lot of other stations must be more broad than that because if you’re too narrow then you don’t have that bigger share which we generally don’t have. If we were at 5’s or 6’s in Sydney, we’d be very. very happy with that because we focus on such a particular demographic.  But if you’re a commercial station it might be seen as not doing well enough,” says Scaddan.

Yet, it’s a rare trick for a station to be able to remain young and fresh to today’s 18-24’s even as their parents who grew up with the station grows older.

Scaddan explains, “Despite everything that I’ve just said, we do have a big broad audience. We have quite a lot of people who are well past 24 listening to triple j, and that’s fantastic, and we welcome that. But we don’t make radio for those people. We love that people who are older listen to and appreciate triple j, but we cant let that sway the way that we think about how we are programming the music, in particular, and how we choose the content that our presenters are going to talk about and the way our presenters talk about music and their lives and everything like that.”

There’s another big difference with triple j. It is totally networked across Australia.

Sacdden concedes, “That’s a massive challenge for us, absolutely! We’re always trying to talk about local stories in a way that a national audience can relate. You can see that sometimes reflected in our figures for our breakfast show which is a little bit lower than the rest of the network. That’s because traditionally it’s the time when people are looking for local news, traffic, weather and stuff that’s actually quite specific to their locality.

“There’s no set answers for that except really thinking about how someone in another city can relate to a story and actually make sense of it. That’s what’s at the heart of it. And other times you just go whole hog if something amazing is happening in Melbourne or Tamworth or wherever, then you can go and specifically talk about what’s happening in those places.”

Given the survey results of last week and a fair few before that triple j connects with its target audience in ways that others don’t.

Chris Scaddan sums it up, “We generally feel that people like triple j because it’s reliable, it’s independent, it’s credible and it’s genuine in the way that other media can be…  a little bit less so.”

Peter Saxon