This article, analysing the current New Zealand radio scene, has been contributed by John Adeane, an Australian who has recently been working in NZ and is soon to return to Australia.

One of the delights for me of a drive from Sydney to Brisbane and back is being
able to surf golden oldie stations and enjoy not only lots of great classics,
but hear them without repeats of the same songs and same artists.

Full marks to programmers doing their jobs with commitment, and with respect for
the listeners’ wishes.

Sadly, that’s not a pleasure available to listeners in New Zealand, a country
that until the mid 1980s, boasted a quality of radio programming and announcer
presentation comparable with that of any in the Commonwealth.

Fledgling Radio
1XX in the sleepy Bay of Plenty, New Zealand’s first private station in a
non-metro market when it went to air in 1971, is still remembered for the
brilliance of its programme directorship under Les Western-Russell and ruthless
management by media icon Trevor Egerton, resulting in a standard of on-air
presentation that ran in national analysis second only to the legendary Radio
Hauraki.

In no small measure of puzzlement, anyone in radio or with industry experience
must ask: why this difference today between two nations so close in listener
tastes and market demographs? That’s except for country music, which in NZ is
sneered at as Hicksville and is extremely rarely aired.

Platitudinous drivel (less charitably referred to as verbal diarrhoea) many
listeners are still prepared to tolerate; this includes endless waffling
analysis of currently popular films or last night’s television soapy episodes,
or talking up to the vocals over every intro, even strong ones, for the sake of
sounding clever (called “sounding tight”), together with condescension in the
form of treating phone-in callers as if they have the IQ of an oyster, even the
whetting of the listener’s appetite for a return to music by playing a jingle,
only to plunge into more talk or an ad break.

But make your audience suffer an inexplicably high playlist rotation, and you
will lose that audience – for good.

As we know, people commonly refer to a
station’s playing “the same old songs over and over.” It’s what we in the
industry call a high, or tight, rotation. In a Top 40 format it’s fine. You’ll
get away with it, because you’re only catering for a teenage audience of no
discernment: if it’s got a repetitious beat and it’s danceable, children don’t
care if you just broadcast a recording of a diesel generator.

But for a mature audience (and a dollar-spending one), an age group that has
grown up with decades of chart toppers, there’s an awful lot of music to be
played to evoke those warm fuzzies and satisfy the memories. Fail, and the
listener knob-twiddles to another station. Gone. Just like that. And why
should he return? How is he to know that you have rectified your shortcomings?

He’s pre-set now to a station he likes, end of story.

Solid Gold FM (Auckland-based, nation-wide network) fell into this trap of
playing favourites (presumably those of the network’s music programmer), and it
was the first of two curious mistakes by a station with a world of potential to
score in what demographs show clearly to be the second biggest (behind talkback)
commercial radio market in New Zealand – that is, the golden oldies music
audience.

The station used to feature the hits of the 50s and 60s with the very occasional
70s classic thrown in. The concept is marvellous, except that the station works
on a rotation of just 500 tracks – unprecedentedly tight in my experience.

Allowing for non-music time – news, weather, jock chat and ads to the legal
hourly max – this means that any given song repeats every 15 hours, or 11 times
a week. If I’d only been told of such lazy programming, I’d never have believed
it. That’s actually a conservative estimate, as it allows three minutes a
record, and the oldies in fact average one and a half to two and a half.

The station then compounded its folly last year by rebranding, and featuring the
hits of the 70s and 80s, with the odd 60s dropped into the mix. So Solid Gold
is now no different from Classic Hits (part of the opposition Radio Network),
which has always played the hits of the 70s and 80s, anyway, and again plays an
insanely tight rotation.

Solid Gold’s webmaster and one-time
morning women’s announcer Adam Butler said, however, “There is no survey
evidence supporting claims that more songs means more listeners.”

I beg to differ.

Programming a Queensland station, I received an industry award (PATERS) for an
achievement that I was able to duplicate, evidenced by community recognition
through a newspaper “success story” feature, 10 years later in country New South
Wales – and it was for doing precisely what is working in Australia now and
what Solid Gold’s spokesman said wouldn’t work.

With a playlist of not a mere
500, but of 5000 tracks, I balanced male and female, solo and group, vocal and
instrumental, but most importantly I ensured that the listener never heard the
same track more often than once a month. That paid dividends. Letters of
appreciation from listeners flowed in. Ratings soared and advertising
increased. It honestly was as simple as that.

Now you will hear not only the same artist but often the same song at almost the
same hour of each afternoon on Solid Gold. It became once like déjà vu in a bad
dream, knowing that as I drove home from work along Travis Road past or
approaching the Parnwell Road junction in Burwood I’d hear Elton John singing
Crocodile Rock; it happened three days running, then another three consecutive
days in the same location it was Billy Joel’s She’s Got a Way.

But it’s all right now. I turned the radio off. I play tapes in the car, so I’m
one potential customer the advertiser’s message is not reaching – and an
extrapolation of that scenario is surely commercial radio’s worst nightmare.

Why risk it?