Why 2Day FM’s breakfast shows keep ‘imploding’
Southern Cross Austereo (SCA) still has years of pain before it will fully recover from the defection of Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson, former radio and TV star – now founder of ‘influencer marketplace’ Tribe – Jules Lund has predicted.
Echoing the sentiments of current Sydney 2Day FM breakfast host Em Rusciano – who attracted attention last week when she admitted the recent restructure of the program had been an ego blow, she was working with people she would never have personally selected and she was six months from imploding – Lund told Wil Anderson that radio shows in Australia implode because they are cast by an executive, in a similar way to an arranged marriage.
Lund: Radio veterans can rest on their laurels
Anderson, who currently fronts SCA’s Triple M Breakfast in Melbourne alongside Eddie McGuire and Luke Darcy, agreed, comparing the radio casting process to television’s Married At First Sight.
“If you watch Married At First Sight, none of them are with their original partners. They all went on a TV show, got married to a complete stranger, and now they’ve hooked up with other complete strangers from the show. So if they can’t last nine weeks of a TV show, how do you imagine a radio partnership’s going to last?” Anderson quipped on his Wilosophy podcast, released today.
“Isn’t that effectively what the radio industry here in Australia is? Like literally everyone just has radio shows and then they split up and do musical chairs,” Lund said.
Lund once fronted the Sydney breakfast program, along with Sophie Monk, Merrick Watts and former Spice Girl Mel B, and said the ‘sad reality’ of commercial radio in Australia is it’s difficult to remove radio stalwarts, and there is no new talent coming through.
The 2014 2Day FM breakfast show
“Em Rusciano’s been with 10 people. Ed Kavalee’s been with 10. I’ve been with 10. Merrick Watts has been with everyone… It’s a sad reality about Australian radio – they can’t get rid of radio people. There’s no one else coming up.”
Lund said radio veterans can therefore rest on their laurels because they know networks will eventually ask them back – also advising anyone on the way out not to burn their bridges.
He then turned his attention to his time on the 2Day FM breakfast show in Sydney – a gig which was also offered to Anderson – and said he accepted it because he had less to lose than Anderson, and because SCA just kept upping the offer.
“[Sandilands and Henderson] took 70% [of the audience with them]. And when those first ratings came through, we went ‘of course’…. Of course. If you’re going to a friend’s house every day for 10 years, and your friend moves, you don’t just keep going back to the house and introduce yourself to the new friends… You just change the GPS to Kiis,” Lund said.
“And, funnily enough, that’s what their listeners did. They just went ‘Oh, I’ll just change the dial’. So we were in this crater… it’s [still] such a big hole. Like, honestly, I actually reckon towards the end, like me, Sophie [Monk] and Merrick [Watts], we’ve done the best radio we’ve ever done. We absolutely laughed, and it was amazing. Three very unique individuals. Like we’re all mental in different ways. It was tough, but we had such a love for each other, and the radio was fun, but by then, no one was listening. It was like, we were down the alleyway. You didn’t get the traffic. People weren’t passing it,” he said.
“It will take 10 years [to build it back up]. And I was like ‘Nup. I can’t be effed. I’ve got better things to do with my time’.”
Anderson, however, said he saw SCA’s post-Sandilands and Henderson troubles coming, and knew it was best to stay away – a decision Lund called a “great” one.
“It felt nice to be wanted,” Anderson said, after discussing how both SCA executives and Lund himself had hounded him to join the program. “[But] I knew it was going to be a disaster. Not because of you [Lund], not because of the quality of the show… It just felt like where that station was, and following in the footsteps of that show, and the time it was going to take to turn around the audience and all that sort of thing…. I didn’t feel like it would work.”
Lund admitted there was panic when their ratings started flowing in in 2014 and that he “copped it” from station management and was micro-managed. In retrospect, however, the ratings weren’t too bad, he said.
Anderson joked: “At the time everyone was like ‘These numbers are too low’. These days, they’d be like, ‘Can we just get back to those Jules Lund numbers?’”
Sandilands and Henderson went out on 2Day FM with a 10.4% audience share. Their first ratings survey with Kiis in 2014 had them on 9.3% – a 6.0 percentage point climb – while Lund’s show kicked off with just 3.8% of the breakfast market.
The current Sydney 2Day FM Breakfast show, with Rusciano, Kavalee and Grant Denyer has a 4.4% audience share. Sandilands and Henderson still lead the FM market over on Kiis with 12.3%. Lund’s program finished with a 3.0% share of the market.
Lund’s podcast with Wil Anderson was released this week, but was recorded prior to Rusciano’s interview.
topics
Em Rusciano
Jules Lund
Merrick Watts
radio
SCA
Sophie Monk
Southern Cross Austereo
Wil Anderson
Wilosophy
Until the 2DayFM breakfast show sounds like a team, and has less of a resemblance to the cast of Fraggle Rock meets The Twilight Zone, It will continue to languish.
Ouch.
User ID not verified.
SCA need to get some talent that actually want to be there and want to make great radio, rather than just a bunch of names that are paid (a lot) to be there. It’s a long road to recovery… might as well have people there that don’t bag out the station, the management and the job.
#Make2dayGreatAgain
User ID not verified.
Who says it will ever recover?
With framentation and more people listening to their own music, there’s no guarantee it will ever be a “success” again
User ID not verified.
You mean like Dan and Maz? Oh wait…
User ID not verified.
Nobody wants to micromanaged and air checked by Austereo:
“next time this particular thing happens that will never happen again ever you should react in a different way.”
“yeah okay dude in denim shirt who failed as on air talent”
User ID not verified.
Radio is supposed to be entertaining. It is also supposed to be like connecting with friends. Somehow FM in Australia and Sydney in particular keeps serving up the same insipid rubbish over and over again and then changing the line up when ….oh what a surprise! another station beats us on a stupid ratings metric by 1 share point. This is not just a Breakfast issue.
Please get some new talent, they don’t have to be “names”
( sarcasm)….they just have to be good….. and give them time to establish themselves, after all, good friendships take a bit of time.
User ID not verified.
Australian commercial radio hit it’s peak with “The Shebang” on Triple M in the early millennium. I challenge anyone to create better chemistry than Marty Sheargold and Fifi Box.
User ID not verified.
Agree completely and they need to get Radio Announcers – not ‘personalities’ who don’t care about getting an audience – they only care about themselves! (Just one opinion from someone who was a No. 1 radio announcer on a No. 5 city station!)
User ID not verified.
I feel this article is more evidence as to why we can’t have cool things for cool people. Wilosophy holds great and usually uncensored insight in to some beautiful minds, your source episode is no longer available and I would think this article may be a contributing factor.
User ID not verified.
Hurts to hear Jules Lund say there is no new talent coming through when you have heaps of young, talented, and extremely motivated people in the industry who are all showing varying levels of incredible success both inside and outside of radio:
Christian Hull
Kristen Henry
Pete Curulli
Ash London
Ryan Jon
Tanya Hennesey
…they’re at the top end of the draft just waiting for a call up, they’re there.
User ID not verified.
Hi Jonathan,
I too am a fan of the Wilosophy podcast and have listened to it for a long time without reporting (or exploiting) it.
I agree that it’s a really difficult balance, and this was a tough decision for me to make.
Ultimately though, I couldn’t ignore the news angle, simply because I have personally been a fan of Wil Anderson since 2001, am a Patreon of his podcasts (which means I pay for the content) and have a solid working relationship with Jules Lund. Ignoring two very prominent and successful media personalities talking about their experiences on, and views about, one of the largest media networks in the country (SCA), especially at a time when that company is already in the media for its alleged issues, would have been showing my bias more than reporting it did.
I agree it is unfortunate the episode is no longer available, and probably have to cop some responsibility for that – however there is definitely more at play here than me reporting what they said. It wasn’t a private Uber conversation or an off-the-record chat. It was two prominent media personalities putting something into the public domain for mutual benefit/ amusement.
I hope we can continue to have nice things, and that Wil doesn’t bow to the outrage brigade.
Thanks,
Vivienne – Mumbrella