Survey Results: smoothfm is #1 FM in Sydney and Melbourne

Former Publisher

Survey #2 results are in and could be best described, in one word, as ‘flat’ in people 10+. At least for the most part. There is, however, plenty to celebrate if you work for NOVA Entertainment.

All the GfK results, market by market insights and key takeaways are below, to bring you up to speed, quickly.

Radio Today will continue its rolling coverage, including The Spin and comments from network content directors on Friday.


Do you have any insights and analysis to contribute? Have you spotted a trend everyone should know about? Share your constructive take on today’s results in the comments below.


SYDNEY: ARN’s Kyle & Jackie O remain king and queen of breakfast at KIIS 106.5

#1 FM Overall – smoothfm
#1 AM Overall – 2GB
#1 FM Breakfast – Kyle & Jackie O
#1 AM Breakfast – Alan Jones
#1 FM Drive – smoothfm
#1 AM Drive – 2GB

With the return of its biggest star, 2GB maintains its stronghold in Sydney, up 0.3 to 11.6%. Alan Jones, as expected, has spiked the breakfast shift upon his long-awaited recovery, gaining 0.6 to 13.5%. 2CH also jumped one share point to 3.9%.

WSFM and Triple M both dipped slightly in people 10+, down 1.4 and 1.2 respectively. The most listen to FM station in Sydney is smoothfm, which climbed 1.6 to 9.9%, placing WSFM at #4 FM.

Triple M’s Grill Team are no long the #2 FM breakfast show in Sydney. That title now belongs to Nova’s Fitzy & Wippa and smoothfm’s Bogart Torelli & Glenn Daniel – both NE shows have a 7.3% market share.


MELBOURNE: Triple M’s Hot Breakfast reclaims #1 at breakfast, bumping Chrissie, Sam & Browny

Nova 100

#1 FM Overall – smoothfm
#1 AM Overall – 3AW
#1 FM Breakfast – Triple M
#1 AM Breakfast – 3AW
#1 FM Drive – Fox FM / Nova
#1 AM Drive – 3AW

Macquarie Media’s 3AW continues its market-leading streak in Melbourne, up 0.8 to 13.8%, and in the all important 55-64 demo, the station gained 3.2 to own 20.2%.

Sports station SEN recovered slightly from Survey #1, earning 1.2 points in people 10+, to 3.9% – just ahead of Radio National on 3.8%.

Not a great result for the newly rebranded Talking Lifestyle in this book. The station lost 1.5% of people 10+, finishing 0.1 points ahead of ABC News, with 1.4%.

The #1 FM in Melbourne is smoothfm, up .05 to 9.9%. They’re trailed by GOLD, up 0.3 to 8.3%, and Fox FM, down one point to 8.1% as #3 FM. There is some growth for KIIS, up 0.6 to 6.5% with a nice bump for Hughesy & Kate in drive, up 1.3 to 7.7%.

And Triple M’s Hot Breakfast with Eddie Mcguire swoops in as the #1 FM show ahead of Nova’s Chrissie, Sam & Browny.


BRISBANE: Hit105 breaky no longer #1 in Brisvegas, post the Robin Bailey effect

#1 FM Overall – Nova
#1 AM Overall – ABC Radio
#1 FM Breakfast – Nova
#1 AM Breakfast – ABC Radio
#1 FM Drive – Nova
#1 AM Drive – ABC Radio

The Robin Bailey effect continues to impact Brisbane, with an undeniable swing to Nova who are now the #1 station in the market with a high-five-worthy 13.8% market share, rising 2.8 points.

Nova also claims the #1 FM breakfast show with Ash, Kip & Luttsy; the #1 drive show with Kate, Tim & Marty; and the #1 night show with Smallzy’s Surgery.

With that, SCA’s Hit105 breaky loses its first place position it gained in breakfast in Survey #1, dropping to #3 in the primetime shift and Triple M’s breakfast show is now #2 FM with 11.8%.

973FM continues to lose listeners, down 1.0 to a flat 10% in breakfast. Overall the ARN-owned station is continueing to see the negative impact of Bailey exit; they’re down 1.1 in people 10+ to 11.4%. The once supreme 973FM, as a result, is now the #3 most listen to station among Brisbane radio listeners.

4KQ are up 0.6 to 8.1% owning the #1 AM Breakfast show with Laurel, Gary & Mark. Talking Lifestyle are also losing more ground in Brisbane, down 0.6 to 1.5%.


ADELAIDE: Mix 102.3’s Jodie & Soda remain Adelaide’s favourite FM breakfast show

#1 FM Overall – Mix
#1 AM Overall – ABC Radio
#1 FM Breakfast – Mix
#1 AM Breakfast – ABC Radio
#1 FM Drive – Nova
#1 AM Drive – Fiveaa

Mix remains the #1 station in Adelaide, rising 0.5 to 12.5%. They also have the #1 breakfast show with Jodie & Soda, up 0.5 to 12.1%. ARN’s Cruise is also up 1.4 to 10%.

A small but important jump of 0.3 for Nova, the #2 FM station in market. Lewis & Lowe with Hayley Pearson in breakfast saw a nice bump too, up 0.6% to a double digit 10%.

FIVEaa’s David & Will is Adelaide’s #2 breakfast show with a 14.4% market share, beaten only by ABC Radio in the same shift with 15.7%. The battle between these two AM favourites continues in people 10+ too, there is only 0.2 between them, with ABC in front; 11.8 to FIVEaa’s 11.6.

Over to SCA and Hit107 have dropped 0.8 to a single digit 8% in this book. All its key shifts, including breakfast (-0.6) and drive (-1.2) experienced some flattening. Triple M climbed 0.6 in people 10+ with a 9.8% market share and also saw a nice gain of 2.6 points in the 25-39 demo. Breakfast is also up 0.9 to 10.3%.


PERTH: Double digit survey streak continues for Mix 945’s Clairsy, Matt & Kymba

#1 FM Overall – Mix
#1 AM Overall – ABC Radio
#1 FM Breakfast – Mix
#1 AM Breakfast – ABC Radio
#1 FM Drive – Mix
#1 AM Drive – ABC Radio

Mix is again the most listened to station in Perth, climbing back up 0.2 points to 14.5% in these results. It’s also #1 in breakfast, drive, mornings and afternoons.

ARN’s troubled 96FM is again seeing some much-needed improvement. The station up 0.4 to 9.1% in peiple 10+. Carmen & Fitzi are up 0.2 to 7.9% in breakfast and Hughesy & Kate are making ground in drive, up 1.0 to 8.3%.

Nova 93.7 is the #2 most listened to station with 11.8%, down 0.6. The breakfast show with Nathan, Nat & Shaun is #2 FM in its slot, albeit down 0.5 points to 12.2%.

Hit92.9 have a notable increase in listeners, up 1.4 to 10.8%. There is also a rise for Heidi, Will & Woody in breakfast, up 1.7 to 10.3%.

Overall at 6iX, there has been an increase in share to 5.1%, as well as an increase most sessions – breakfast (+0.8%), mornings (+1.1%), afternoons (+0.3%), drive (+0.1 %), evenings (+0.4 %) and weekends (+0.4%).

And not a great book for 6PR who dropped 0.4 in people 10+ to 6.9% and experienced slight dips across most sessions including breakfast (-0.3) and evenings(-2.6).


Share your constructive take on today’s results in the comments below…

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Recent comments (20)
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Dale
27 Apr 2017 - 10:57 am

Talking Lifestyle 882… what can we say.. #Fail … turn it off

LJ
27 Apr 2017 - 12:16 pm

Great result for Smooth – the music director is doing a fantastic job. It’s my new fave to de-stress in peak-hour traffic! Poor result for 2Day brekky with only a 0.1 gain for Em – she is very polarising. In Brisbane 973 must be wishing they held on to Robyn.

RadioNerd
27 Apr 2017 - 12:53 pm

Dale,
Your saying that Talking Lifestyle 882 is a #fail by one survey… give it time for it to grow. I listen to the station and hear a lot of listeners from Bris and Melb.

Don’t write the station off yet.

nick bartlett
27 Apr 2017 - 1:12 pm

Spot on Dale – Talking Lifestyle is the vega of Brisbane radio. And it lost almost 50% of its Melbourne audience. Life support needed but none in sight. Call 000.
Starting bid for 882 and 1278 combined is $50. Do I hear $60?

Fun, Real and #4
27 Apr 2017 - 1:18 pm

How are those attack promos going for you now 973FM?

Terrific Radio
27 Apr 2017 - 2:29 pm

Ross and John!
Wow…..great radio,great result.
Those Gentlemen own the Melbourne radio market.
Communicators….that’s what wins ratings.

Bob
27 Apr 2017 - 4:13 pm

Looks like 97 in Brissie will do a 96 Perth. Will take them ages to recover from this.
Expect a ” relaunch ‘ next year. I’d write this year off ARN Brisbane.

Woops
27 Apr 2017 - 4:29 pm

What happened to fox breakfast?

It’s last!

Bris Radio Fan
27 Apr 2017 - 5:39 pm

Good to see Nova bounce back. You have to give credit to Hit105 breakfast for going up again that show is sounding great

Dan
27 Apr 2017 - 7:26 pm

Congratulations to all who managed to get a good result. I see Mix in Adelaide on top again. Nova’s 919 breaky show is really sounding great though. Shane Lowe is a talent, Nova has been holding onto him tightly and with good reason. Hit107 needs attention asap.

BC
27 Apr 2017 - 8:06 pm

Talking Lifestyle is a disaster in Brisbane and Melbourne. It will not recover. It’s like one excruciatingly long infomercial!
Great result for Smooth FM! Time to promote themselves on DAB in the other capitals.
97.3 has more problems than just breakfast. So boring and repetitive playlist of only the lamest music. Time for a re-think. They need to ‘smoothify’.

Baz
27 Apr 2017 - 9:08 pm

Begs the question who at SCA sacked Robin Bailey when she was #1 at B105 a few years back?

Mike
28 Apr 2017 - 2:54 am

SCA now 8th and 9th in Sydney, 5th and 8th in Melbourne, 6th and 7th in Adelaide,
2nd and 4th in Brisbane and Perth looks ok at 1st and 3rd. The wise men from the east aren’t allowed to touch the Perth market. SCA’s showing in the top markets of Syd and Melb must be a great concern.

Seagull
28 Apr 2017 - 5:54 pm

Melbourne simply doesn’t like Sydney talk radio. Look back to the MTR disaster.
In one survey the 2UE infomercial has more than halved Magic 1278’s former miserable listenership.
Bring back Magic 693 with all those happy presenters and jingles and the Best Hits Of All Time.
No wonder the bland and repetitive Smooth is rating so well. With more than 40 digital stations in Melbourne it simply has no competition. Amazing.

Joe
29 Apr 2017 - 12:34 pm

2CH managers who changed it from the format it use to use follow ( which Smooth FM now uses) needs to reprimanded. One manager there displayed very poor customer service to me when I made suggestions. Smooth FM seems to be listening to stakeholders and attending to their needs. Although I hate the recorded non-live announcers – so artificial.

Joe
29 Apr 2017 - 12:35 pm

Talking Lifestyle – 2UE need to bring back Clive Robertson and Mike Jeffreys. The managers there who think listeners prefer young, inexperienced broadcasters need to be reprimanded.

Joey
29 Apr 2017 - 2:28 pm

I think that people need to give Talking Lifestyle (TL) some time to develop. There’s only one other time in a generation that I recall a Melbourne station changing its name, format and network alignment in one hit and that was in the very early days of ARN when 3DB changed into 3TT (which, like Magic to TL, prompted a significant yet expected cut in audience share in the first survey result). Furthermore, the environment is nothing like a generation ago. It’s so fragmented now that it’s not even viable for some stations to carve out their own niche in the way we may have thought about a niche 5 years ago (when MTR was last heard). What TL and Classic Rock Radio represent are “value-adds” to the listeners of 3AW and SEN. You can’t make sense of the commercial decisions made here without first understanding that. Stations can also no longer rely on the single metric of ratings figures to demonstrate their engagement with audience in this fragmented age, hence the value of SEN’s claims regarding their digital platform metrics: podcast downloads, news article reads and social media accounts. Such extreme fragmentation as we now have also means you need a brand, not just a radio station. Smooth is a multi-platform, multi-experience “brand”, even if it does little more than play music. Classic Rock Radio and Koffee could be brands if they were resourced better. Most digital music stations are not brands. They are aural wallpaper undermined by an empowered listener with enough choices to create their own playlists on any number of platforms. Talking Lifestyle, in choosing not to be a music station anymore (though it notably plays some) has to operate in this quite new complex environment. So it’s credible, if not good or great, that they have merely sustained their Sydney audience with so many changes made and held some audience share elsewhere where a fall was probably expected and accounted for.

Pierre
29 Apr 2017 - 4:48 pm

KIIS 1065 need something better at 3pm and a better lead in to 4pm a new night show move the thinker girls to 9pm and get a night count down show

Pierre
29 Apr 2017 - 6:43 pm

If kiis 1065 got rid of there 3pm show and replaced it was something better that would help them also help Hughesy and Kate and moved there 7pm show to 9pm and got a new show at 7pm I reckon that would help there ratings

Jason
1 May 2017 - 12:46 pm

How long has 2DayFM been at the bottom of the FM ratings for now?
What a disaster.

Jobs

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