AM radio and its future for ABC Local Radio

This morning, I was on two AM radio stations from the ABC, talking about switching to FM.

In Australia, AM listening has halved in the last ten years, and emergency broadcasting is only useful if people can actually listen. If fewer people even own an AM radio, there’s little point broadcasting on it. This isn’t a technical debate.

If I was to start talking technical, then there’s an undeniable issue in capital cities with AM reception - reinforced concrete is a Faraday cage, LED lights and ADSL causes horrible interference, tram tracks and train lines similarly. But none of these problems are in the country - where AM goes further than FM (though costs around ten times as much to broadcast, so…)

Australia is two separate broadcast markets.

In the capital cities, the fact that AM reaches further is immaterial. If you’re a radio station covering the city of Brisbane, you can do that on FM. But, as I’ve suggested in the past, the ideal is to simulcast. The difficulty there is that you lose much of the arguments about saving money and environmental benefits.

What’s undeniable is that it’s more important than ever that ABC Local Radio is where the audience is - which is not AM radio.

I’m reminded of my experience at Virgin Radio in the UK. An AM radio station playing rock music, which sounds particularly bad on AM. You’d assume that Virgin’s audience would have been excited about better audio quality, so we ran plenty of ads about DAB on that station’s AM frequencies. Yes, we did well shifting many listeners over; but we also failed to shift many of them. Why? Because AM listeners really like AM. So, as you listen to the feedback on Spencer’s show, remember that this is feedback from AM listeners. The trouble is… there aren’t very many of those left now. What we really want to do is to find non-AM listeners. And we’ll not do that on AM.

612 ABC Radio Brisbane

Fun to be in with Spencer Howson, on 612 ABC Radio Brisbane. I managed to get this in video, as a special treat.

720 ABC Radio Perth

And then, fifteen minutes later, I was on-air two hours earlier on ABC Radio Perth (timezones!!), with Clint Wheeldon.