2Day FM aims younger with major format change
Sydney’s 2Day FM has undergone a massive format shift, aiming for the younger end of the demographic with a guarantee to play “more new music than any other commercial radio station in Sydney” and a commitment to support more Australian artists.
A press release from the station rattles off the types of artists you’re now likely to hear on the station: Troye Sivan, Doechii, The Kid Laroi, SZA, Kita Alexander, Kendrick Lamar, Dom Dolla, Sabrina Carpenter, Young Franco, Drake, Billie Eilish, Tobiahs, and Cyril.
The station will market their new sound with a social-first campaign that it says will “showcase the youthful and vibrant side of Sydney”.
This move was signalled late last year when The Jimmy & Nath Show was moved into Breakfast, after the unceremonious mid-week removal of Hughesy, Ed & Erin.
Southern Cross Austereo’s chief content officer Dave Cameron told Mumbrella at the time the young breakfast team were “highly commercially attractive” and “doing a style of radio at the moment that is not being done in the city”.
He hinted towards a larger shift in a market that “hasn’t really had much change for many, many years”.
Now, Emma Chow has joined the duo as a full-time team member, with “a full station overhaul” in the works.
Jimmy Smith, Emma Chow and Nath Roye
The new sound
The new sound hit the airwaves this morning. A few hours after the format switch, Cameron told Mumbrella the format change has been in works for “longer than people think”.
“Without putting an exact time on it, we’ve been contemplating this move for quite a while and moving all the right pieces of the puzzle together,” he said.
“It started with Jimmy and Nath trialling last year. We moved Emma into somewhat of a trial spot and that team has just rocked it together. And the final part of the puzzle that we’ve been doing, in tandem with getting the Breakfast show sounding as energetic as it now is, is actually thinking about doing something different with the format that I don’t think has been done in a couple of decades in this market.”
Cameron joked the last major change Sydney radio saw “was when everyone was thinking about the millennial bug”. The shift to a new music format came after surveying their audiences.
“It was pretty clear where the opportunity was,” he said. “And it was to stop doing everything that everyone else was doing and actually start breaking some new music again, support the Australian music industry and have some fun with a new format that’s exposing great new artists and great new music. ”
Kiri Martin, senior music director across the Hit Network, is the one tasked with leading this musical switch. She tells Mumbrella the goal is “breaking those new domestic artists and giving them a platform” correctly pointing out “no other commercial radio station in Sydney is doing that”.
Dave Cameron
Both Martin and Cameron promised to overdeliver on the 25% local content quota they are held to by broadcasting laws.
“We’re freeing up our playlist to be able to endorse not only new music from overseas, but new music from Australian artists here. So we will over-deliver on that,” Cameron said.
Not surprisingly, this support is being heartily welcomed by the music industry, with Cameron receiving excited messages from the heads of all three major labels this morning.
“They’re going, ‘thank God we’ve got a place where someone’s going to take a bit more of a risk.'”
As Cameron reasoned: “We’ve got nothing to lose – and we want to find a point of difference in the market.”
Supporting Australian music and playing the latest hits – in 2025, it’s just crazy enough to work.
2Day’s long and winding history
Sydney radio exploded in 1980, with the birth of Triple M, Triple J, and 2Day FM. The latter was launched with a stable of high-profile owners — John Laws, Mike Willesee, Graham Kennedy, and the Village Roadshow company all held a stake.
Given the owners, it shouldn’t be too surprising it started as an easy-listening station. By the end of the decade, Austereo had taken 2Day, and skewed the playlist towards the pop charts.
The 1990s was a peak period for the station. Comedians Wendy Harmer and Peter Moon commanded the breakfast ratings with The Morning Crew, while Tony Martin and Mick Molloy started in Drive in 1995, fresh from the cult ABC sketch comedy The Late Show.
Tony Martin and Mick Molloy
Martin/Molloy quickly became one of the most successful radio shows of all time, winning the ratings for three years and being syndicated to 50 stations across the country. Their mixture of low/high brow comedy seemed more at home on rival station Triple M, to the extent that Martin recalled years later the chairman of Austereo once told him: “I always said you and Mick were the heart and soul of Triple M.”
“I had to remind him that we weren’t on Triple M,” Martin told Radio Today.
Ugly Phil’s Hot 30 launched in 1997, hosted by Phil O’Neil and his then wife Jackie O. In hindsight, this was a turning point for the network. By the end of the century, O’Neil and Henderson’s marriage had splintered, and O’Neil left the station, to be replaced by a young, Brisbane-based talent named Kyle Sandilands.
The station’s reliance on stand-up comedians was waning. Tony Martin and Mick Molloy had left the station in 1998. The on-air pairing of Moon and Harmer in Breakfast fell apart, and a succession of comedians — Judith Lucy, Greg Fleet, Peter Helliar, Kaz Cooke — couldn’t correct the ship.
Jackie O and Kyle Sandilands
Jackie O and Kyle Sandilands were moved into Breakfast in 2005 and proceeded to win 52 straight radio surveys in a row. The pair’s successful and controversial radio stunts were soon aped elsewhere at the network, with devastating results.
The Hot 30 show faced backlash — and breached broadcasting codes — in 2007 when young host Craig Lowe invited a porn star on air to describe her day-to-day. In 2012, the show prank called a hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge was being treated and managed to trick a nurse into breaching privacy protocols, the pressure of which was widely reported to have contributed to the nurse taking her own life. The Metropolitan Police, the NSW Police, and the ACMA all became involved, and Austereo canned the Hot 30 program and suspended prank-call stunts across the entire network.
The following year, Kyle and Jackie O left the station – and the ratings went with them. By the end of 2014, the 2Day breakfast show held just 3.3% of the timeslot audience, as the station cycled through over a dozen different talent combinations in an attempt to recapture the magic. Rove McManus and Sam Frost was just one odd pairing.
In 2020, 2DayFM — and the entire Hit Network — rebranded, moving from being an under 40s network to aim for the broader 30-54 market. Last year saw the station preparing to shuffle again, with the aforementioned removal of the Hughesy, Ed & Erin from the Breakfast slot signalling a change in the air.
SCA chief John Kelly was blunt about the reasoning at the time, telling Mumbrella: “We need to drive results that deliver, in a profitable way, the audiences that matter.
“Clearly, we made a decision that it was time for change.”
That change starts today.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Sounds like Nova back in the 00’s… “Sounds Different”
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Great article, thanks for the reminders.
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First you have to entice young people to listen to radio. They don’t and won’t.
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2Day FM says they’ll ‘overdeliver’ on the 25% Australian music quota, but does anyone know if that means prime-time hours or if most of it will be buried in the late-night/early morning slots?
Are they actually committing to showcasing Aussie artists when people are listening, or just meeting the bare minimum requirements?
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