Triple J has put out a press release promoting its Hottest 100 Countdown tomorrow for Australia Day and it doing so gave away its blueprint for targeting commercial radio ratings.
The two tell-all statements are:
– There are 26 Hottest 100 debutantes.
And
– It’s an upbeat year! The average BPM of the Hottest 100 is 123, compared to 121 in 2014 and 116 in 2013.
More votes for songs with higher BPM (beats per minute) suggests that Triple J is playing more pop music than usual in the past year. If 26 of the Hottest 100 songs are from first time acts to the Hottest 100 that suggests Triple J programming has dramatically changed to reflect artists from outside its core demographic taste base and in doing so must be playing less of the artists it once considered core to its audience.
In other words, Triple J is deliberately moving away from his loyal audience by seducing commercial radio listeners to its lair.
A further indicator that Triple J has been deliberately targeting commercial radio formats. “Number of successful troll campaigns? Zero”. That statement suggests that if there were no successful troll campaigns, all 26 new acts debuting in this years Hottest 100 are from within the Triple J playlist and approved by the network’s programming department.
It is no secret that Triple J did serious damage to commercial radio listening habits and ratings in 2015. The impact was felt where it hurt most, in the 18-24 and 25-39 demographics, the two key advertisers desired demos. As a government owned radio station Triple J does not accept advertising. That mean advertising agencies were faced with reduced audiences to market too and when the size of the audience drops, so does the price of advertising.
Triple J spent chunks of 2015 in the no 1 spot of the 18-24 and 25-39 demographics in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. Triple J ripped tens of millions of dollars of value out of the three commercial radio networks, Austereo, DMG and ARN, in 2015 and will continue to do so in 2016 with its current programming philosophy of turning a once alternative youth network into an ad-free pop station.
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