A few weeks ago radioinfo published thoughts from community radio about ratings results in the Sydney market.

radioinfo interviewed Edge FM’s PD Phil Brandel about his station, which may also be part of the ‘missing 10%’ of Sydney listeners who do not listen to the mainstream stations.

You took issue with the views expressed by community radio about the “missing 10%” of Sydney listeners not accounted for in the ACNielsen published results. As PD of ARN’s The Edge, what is your viewpoint?

I think community radio does have its listeners but there are some very big players out there who would be taking the majority of that 10% such as us, C91.3 and also Gosford and Wollongong. With community radio’s limited signal, and marketing I think they’re more likely to have smaller slices of the audience pie.

Community Radio thinks that all the figures should be made public – do you agree with that?

I think that if you are prepared to pay and comply with guidelines, you should be able to participate.

Do you know who listens to the Edge?

We have just conducted and on-line listener survey on our website , and its proved to be very interesting. After 17,000 individual surveys, over 80% of our audience is aged 15-25. With a 50 – 50 split between males and females.

What is your core audience target?

18-34 year olds in Sydney’s west and the Mountains , while we also recognise we have a lot of teens listening we are committed to the 18-34 year olds

The Edge is one of those hidden success stories as far as young listeners are concerned. Describe your format?

Very Hot CHR. We have about 6 tracks a week that come around every 2-3 hours (our A’s) We are very chart based and we don’t play anything older than say 18 months old. Basically we add 3-4 songs are week and drop 3-4. So as a song is popular we flog it until it burns then either drop it or put it in gold and then jump on the next big track.

What is in your high rotation list this week?

Complicated – Avril Lavigne, two wrongs Wyclef Jean, Bare Naked Jennifer love Hewitt, Objection Shakira, rich girl Selwyn, feel it boy – Beanie Man

Do you think the recent restriction imposed on Ipswich’s The River will have any effect on The Edge?

Not sure how far they went, but from what I understand they started branding themselves as a Brisbane station and not an Ipswich one. We aren’t pretending to be a Sydney station at all, we service Katoomba and Penrith first, and then western Sydney. If anyone in the North Shore, Eastern Suburbs or the Shire listens that’s well and good but we don’t chase them.

Any other thoughts on your audience?

A few months ago we did a survivor type promotion with 5 listeners, vying for a full time job on the station. In the 2 weeks we ran the promotion, we got 55, 000 individual votes on the website.
The listener survey we have been running for three weeks has had over 16,000 surveys filled out (once again on the net) we get over 30,000 hits on our website per week and have been Australia’s number 1 radio website for over 4 years now. Last year we completed a Panorama survey with AC Nielson that suggested us we have about 300,000 listeners in Survey areas 4 and 5.