When we last spoke to Grant Blackley, he was about to take over the helm of SCA as their new CEO and Managing Director. In part one of our CEO Roundtable Revisited with Grant, we will talk about the recent SCA Full Year results - “Radio is a growing medium and I think it is undervalued.”
How does he balance the demands of keeping the shareholder and investors happy versus the staff, sales and the product side?
It has also been a year where SCA have invested some big money in marketing and talent. Some has paid off and some is still growing. Is Grant happy with the progress of 2Day FM and Rove and Sam on Breakfast? “Is that where we want it to sit? No!”
Personally I’m a fan of the Friday/Saturday night changes. Being able to listen to “normal” music will get me listening to SCA stations again when I’m driving at night - with some towns basically only about to get dance or football on commercial radio at the moment.
What’s also not mentioned is the this means that Take 40 is no more. They’ve obviously decided that the rather weak afternoon shows aren’t worth the effort, leaving that space open for local/networked music (depending on the station).
That would be the closest… though only available in the 5 metros. Is it still done live based off the live iTunes charts?
I remember listening to Take 40 with Barry Bissell as a kid waiting to hear which song was Number 1. Even with the internet in the early 2000s, while the charts were available online it still wasn’t used that much.
These days that information is very easily available to anyone that wants it, and ARIA isn’t the only chart the people pay attention to, so Take 40 has been losing relevance for years. (Which hasn’t been helped with a recent history of horribly annoying hosts).
Ditto. Fox FM had it on Saturday nights, and American Top 40 on Sunday nights. I think in Sydney in the '80s Take 40 was carried on 2SM though or maybe Triple M?
But i knew if i missed Take 40 on Fox I could hear it on Sunday afternoons on 3UL (now 3GG) from Warragul…
Take 40’s website mentions that they are still on at 2pm Saturdays on the h!t network, and there is a gap in the revamped weekend schedule in the link you’ve posted for that to still occur.
It would indeed be a sad day if Take 40 was no more, I have fond memories of the Barry Bissell days in the mid-late 80s.
I thought it was always produced by MCM/Authentic?
I think it still is/pretends to be… Don’t know how that works tbh…
How relevant are chart shows anyway these days? Surely that’s partly why Nova started their new music show - I’m much more interested in new music than a chart I can look up online.
I actually used to like The Hot Hits when the kinda had their own chart, and the Hot 30 when they used to do the same
I thought at the time how odd that was that the FMs in other cities didn’t pick it up I thought it would have suited them all entirely. (Of course in those days commercial FM only existed in the 5 major capitals… a grand total of 7 stations nationwide)
Sad to hear Take 40 Australia will finish this weekend. It has been a great way to hear the songs that otherwise won’t get played on radio, especially at breakfast and drive.
For the past two years the show has been linked to ARIA charts (previously Nova had its own ARIA Chart Show). From next Saturday we all will have to wait until 6pm AEST for the release of this week’s charts on the ARIA website.
