You all have some or a lot of choice about how you spend your time and your money.

On Thursday as we headed into the Easter Long Weekend two radio industry stories started doing the rounds. Firstly there was the cancellation of the 2025 Australian Commercial Radio Awards. This was swiftly and dramatically overshadowed by the revelation that workday announcer Thy, on youth digital station CADA owned by ARN was in fact AI.

People’s issues with Thy seem to be two pronged. ARN and co-creator Eleven Labs really and legally should have informed the audience that Thy wasn’t real. The bigger fear was the implications for people’s jobs.

I believe the absence of the ACRAs this year will do far more damage to the audio industry than any voice clone ever will.

Let’s start with CADA. The station commenced with a bang and big budget three years ago under the guidance of General Manager Emily Copeland who is now Head of Music at the ABC. The hosts and creators largely weren’t people with a radio background. Rather they had impressive social media followings and bold personalities.

One pairing was Flex Mami (Lillian Ahenkan) with comedian & content creator Froomes (Lucinda Price). Six months in their associated podcast had had more than a million downloads. On the anniversary of their first year CADA were getting well more than 130K listeners weekly and were dominating the DAB+ ratings for 25-54s.

On the two year anniversary someone pulled the plug on the station and much of the lineup was retrenched. I happened to catch Emily Copeland’s session at Radiodays Europe around the same time about bringing young listeners back to radio. The foundations, principles and listening numbers were good and yet ARN gave up just as momentum was building.

That’s not to say that CADA has failed. It was very much the top DAB+ station in Sydney Survey 1 2025 but the presenter lineup is now just one, K-Sera from 3-5pm. Sophie Nathan has, according to CADA’s website, departed breakfast. With the knowledge that Thy has been on air for all this year, mornings on CADA in Survey 1 was up by more than 20,000 listeners, afternoons too, which says to me that the station was on in the background a lot over the Australian summer.

This is going to be an unpopular opinion but how is Thy any different to a team member voice tracking all their workday shifts days before they go to air, or pre-recording for a market they don’t live in?

I know that most networks now are spreading their staff across live and voice tracked shifts, a couple of examples being the ACE Radio Network’s Cathy Jubb for 2UE, 3MP and 4BH and the Gold Network‘s Craig Huggy Huggins who was recently announced as the new Adelaide Cruise 1323 host alongside drive on Perth’s 96fm. Not only does Huggy do 9 hours of broadcasting every weekday, if Perth was live, and with the time difference, it would mean more than 12-hour days!

There is a distinction between personality driven radio shows and music driven ones where the announcer is there to forward sell past the ad break, maybe share a news headline and run a comp or two around the songs. Thy is created to be in the background of a music forward program.

I’ve noticed in the Thy uproar, six months after the fact, that most of those who upset about it never listened to CADA anyway. Those who have regularly tuned likely were well across Thy being AI, and if they weren’t it’s because they’re not listening for the banter anyway.

And now as a result of the reaction Thy’s listenership has likely grown exponentially with people trying to check out whether they can pick her AI-ness.

Her AI-ness.

Not her personality.

With respect to the woman in the ARN finance department who provided her voice and image, Thy doesn’t have a personality. Those listening aren’t going to relate to her stories, family background, bad dates and life experience because Thy doesn’t possess these. She is as real as the GPS woman who navigates me home when I get lost. We call her Cecily.

Which brings me to the ACRAs.

The last two years Dani Torresan and I have had the privilege of being backstage to speak with the awards winners as they leave the stage. I read too many comments saying that this industry night of nights was just a way of further inflating egos.

You couldn’t be more wrong.

This night celebrates the campaigns that build communities, like the i98FM Illawarra Convoy which has, so far, raised more than $25 million for the Illawarra Community Foundation and families affected by life threatening and life limiting illnesses.

It is for podcasts that create meaningful change and acknowledge a life cut short, like Hannah’s Story, for Hannah Clarke and her family. Listen below as Melissa Downes, Jess Lodge and Adam Buncher (main picture) talk about what every piece of recognition means to Hannah’s parents Sue & Lloyd Clarke.

It recognised 2GB’s coverage of the Bondi stabbings where Ben Fordham came into work on his day off, interrupting the Continuous Call Team’s football call, because he knew that his listeners, his community would need to know what was happening as it happened.

And it celebrates regional radio like Robbie Goodwin, Kelcie Toet and Mark Stevens from TRFM in Traralgon, whose Avoiding Hackers ad was not only meaningful to their community but provides tangible evidence to the station’s clients that what they make matters and had impact enough to win a national award.

I’ll share Tamara Heinjus’s LinkedIn post below. Tamara has worked for SCA in WA for 20 years and said how I feel about the ACRAs.

“This actually makes me so sad.

Not for myself, but for the kids out there doing their damndest to make a difference.”

That is what the ACRAs you don’t see does. It acknowledges hard work and passion to make a difference for people, real people, working in audio all over Australia. I fear not having a 2025 Awards ceremony will have a knock-on effect to advertisers who will spend their money somewhere else, to the community who might choose to share their stories and time elsewhere and to metro and regional jobs where people’s skills will be further stretched across multiple responsibilities losing the focus and capacity to do their one prime role exceptionally.

It’s not Thy I’m worried about.

Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and podcaster for Radioinfo.