The regional M’s have a very similar music format to the Pure Gold format.
I agree. It would be good to get some of the Triple M stations back to their original call signs like 4TO, 2RG ect.
Wonder what will happen in areas like Cairns, Townsville, Mackay and Rockhampton where they will own 4 stations? My guess is they will keep Triple M the same as the metros except for Townsville. Rebrand Townsville Triple M back to 4TO FM as thand rebrand Power 100 to Triple M???. Rebrand Star or Hit to KIIS.
It won’t be blocked, it satisfies the requirement of separate ownership and control. The 2 station rule is outdated and just results in duplicated formats.
ACMA will follow the letter of the law and this deal will satisfy the requirements. ACCC will have zero interest in this.
There is still a hard limit on what one media-controlling entity can own of another media-controlling entity (which is already in play because ARN owns the maximum allowed of SCA shares). There’s nothing regulatory that stops them from being ‘friendly’ with each other now either
Our media ownership rules are a mess - but there is no political interest in changing them because it’s not what the industry wants, which results in us all losing out.
I’m still unconvinced this would be a good outcome, especially given we already have issues with diversity of ownership
alright so a VERY interesting development here with ARNs board of directors drafting up and directing and firing off the expression of interest letter around to SCAs board around entering into negotiations with each other around signing a merger entity deal to spin off SCA and ARN and to merge and combine and integrate SCA and ARNs assets into a combined entity which would generate in great cost savings and cost synergies and also content synergies across the board and SCAs debt load that would be taken on and acquired by ARNs executive board team would be tremendous but this wouldn’t pass through regulators at ALL
Given this seems to be the industry trend, surely it’s only a matter of time before this happens anyway? SCA appears to have already done a decent job of stripping out every non-critical job.
Yes streaming is the future but disagree there is zero interest in digital. I employee close to 20 drivers, at least 60% of them listen to digital in the company vehicles I supply them. These are all metro Melbourne based employees. I route ride with at least 1 a week and we could be listening to anything from the 774, SEN, GOLD, FOX Smooth Magic etc on DAB.
I’m actually not sure if this proposal would accelerate the job losses or not. They are already happening but is it possible a cosy and profitable arrangement between the two operators might even slow down the job losses overall? With 3 companies competing hard in a mature industry there might actually be MORE focus on cost cutting and hence the job losses. I’m sure some streamlining would occur with resulting losses, but maybe overall it might not be as bad.
Given ARN consider Triple M as one of their two ‘anchor’ brands, would they move Jonesy & Amanda and Christian O’Connell over to the Triple M stations in Syd/Melb? I suspect it won’t happen, but who knows…
I wonder what will happen to Listnr… I suspect all streaming may end up on iHeart Radio?
Hi, major edits after reading through the remaining articles.
Industry reluctance has held Australian broadcasting back in the past and it has ben overcome eventually.
While FM was introduced to many countries in the 40’s and 50’s, it wasn’t introduced in Australia until the 1970’s because the existing broadcasters weren’t interested. However, in the 1960’s and 70’s, several music broadcasting societies formed and they were interested in broadcasting on FM. Also there was growing interest in community broadcasting. Listener lead interest and lobbying helped bring about the introduction of FM in Australia.
The moral of the story, if there is enough listener action, the government will listen. If not, the government will only listen to the existing broadcasters.
I do know that in the past, a broadcaster has obtained permission to temporarily own three stations, and later sold one of them,.
One thing that could happen, generally speaking, is that a broadcaster could temporarily own 3-4 commercial stations, then transfer the best of all of them into the 2 stations that they keep, so that the stations they sell pose the least competitive threat to them.
Alternatively, or in addition, they could choose a buyer who poses the least competitive threat to them. Generally speaking of course.
Theres a few metric based reasons to that first being SCAs sports portfolio in both cricket and AFL rights and second even though the audience share that Triple M is doing across each survey book is the drizzling you know whats the RIO return on investment that the core business strategy that SCAs executives drew up the business plan for and developed and formatted and positioned and structured and put into place and implemented and rolled out to market for SCAs Triple M network is generating in from a revenue and ad revenue standpoint and from a profit standpoint and etc is still profitable.
I may have missed this, if someone else has already said it, but I got the impression that ARN would still programme the stations owned by ACP, even though they don’t own them. They’re technically two different companies, but there’s no reason why they can’t cooperate to have four stations (in markets where there is 4 stations) all with different formats.
I somehow very much doubt that SCA would be forthcoming this time. They weren’t as forthcoming when a buyer tried to buy TV assets from SCA last time. I’m under an impression that SCA is a very hard company to deal with at times.
They will be two independent operators and compete with each other in the metro markets, so its doubtful that ARN would be programming their competitors stations (Hit and Gold/WSFM).
agree. This would be a win win for us all 
