Hot Seat: Jaime Chaux, Digital Content Director, Austereo

16 May 2011

by Nicole Fossati

What is going to need to happen for Radar on the DAB+ format to reach its potential?
Cars. Cars are probably the biggest single thing that will push digital radio along. In-car listening is so big in Australia, you get digital radio in cars and that’s a massive game-changer for our services. It’s starting to happen now, with BMW being the first maker to do this, and there’s many more in-car solutions happening over the next few years. A good market to watch is northern Europe; cars must contain digital radios. It’s been legislated and so it’s quite interesting to see the take-up of digital radio there. We’re still quite a few years off that point though.

Will reporting on audience reach be deeper by 2013?
Absolutely. The challenge is we just don’t have enough audience reach at this time but once that starts to really kick in over the next few years the reporting will be there. The recent announcement by the CRA is that the receiver sales figures have reached four hundred thousand; that many receivers sold in such a short period of time, especially during the GFC, is fantastic. All you’ve gotta do is look at digital television; it’s taken them ten years to get to where they are, so for us to get to where we are after 18 months is fantastic.

Seeing as there’s no deep data, do media buyers find it hard to sell your product?
It can be a challenge. What we try to do is sell the properties as part of a broader Austereo mix - as an example Radar has two FM shows, and both these stations have pages on our Austereo FM websites, so when a client gets involved they get involved over multiple platforms and that’s how we hope we can measure numbers much better.

How do you meet your Australian content quotas?
Our goal is to play a minimum of 50% Australian music at any given time on Radar and that’s a huge number. That’s not a figure that’s been imposed, that’s a figure that we’ve set ourselves. It’s not just about playing an Aussie song. We get the artists in, play their records in full, talk to them about their music and do what we can to cross them over to our FM stations.

We do have a service that doesn’t play Australian music, that is the Mainstage, but I think the radio industry needs flexibility. There are going to be formats that have a consumer demand that do not necessarily play the minimum required amount of Australian content.

So, we (DAB+) make sure our stations collectively meet the Australian content requirements that our FM stations are meeting. Once again, this is something that we have set upon ourselves.

As far as music formats go where does Radar sit?
Radar sits in between commercial radio and the rest. If you take a look at commercial radio now, it has a very tightly researched playlist. At the other end you have Triple J and community radio. Commercial radio plays music that everybody knows but Triple J plays a lot of songs that a lot of people don’t know and there’s a real gap there; it’s a huge gap actually.

Anecdotally, we hear stuff from Radar fans saying they find commercial radio too repetitive at times but they find Triple J and community radio too much hard work, so Radar is filling in that big gap in the middle. The mantra we have for Radar is that it’s new music made easy.

What are the greatest challenges facing DAB+?
The main one is obviously audience reach and digital radios being put into cars and digital radio getting into regional Australia; there will be an increase in receiver sales as time goes on. The good thing is that from the outset, all the broadcasters are offering interesting services on digital radio. The content is there, we just need punters to move over to digital radio.

What difference will Southern Cross Media’s new ownership of Austereo make?
Short-term, it’ll be business as usual. Longer term there’s obvious potential with SCM’s huge audience reach nationally. Once digital starts to roll out in regional Australia, there are obviously opportunities for us to just plug in our services across markets, so it makes our achieving national audience reach much easier.