Great finds!
“Emotions” Mariah Carey on Triple M Sydney!
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Seeing this makes me a bit sad. A lot of good songs in that list, especially Power FM adding Michael Jackson’s cover of Come Together to their playlist. These days, radio is a bit too safe and playing the same stuff over and over.
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Yes, Triple M Sydney back then were pretty much like the regionals now.
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Love that. Thanks for posting!
Think they might have mixed up 4BC and 4KQ though? I don’t remember BC playing much music in '91, but then I didn’t listen to them much. 4KQ was probably in Greatest Memories & Latest Hits phase then.
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Yeah, i don’t think their history is as much “rock”’ as it’s made out to be.
I recall a 1985 aircheck somewhere that has them playing Diana Ross.
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I recall at night hearing Billy Joel “I Go To Extremes” on 1116 4BC at the time of release (early 90s).
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I remember radio from that time and it wasn’t that good.
For a start, stations here in Melbourne (and probably other state capitals) didn’t play a lot of pop and dance music no matter how high it would reach in the charts, except in countdown shows and a late Saturday night party-mix show on one station. There were a few exceptions as the 90’s progressed. They also played lots of old songs. While Triple M had a rock heavy format, FOX FM back then had the slogan of “Good times and great rock’n’roll”. Other commercial FM stations weren’t much better and forget about AM. 3XY did play a few such songs, but they also didn’t play a lot of these songs, and anyway, they closed down in 1991.
Not only that, but in 1989 and maybe a bit after that, whenever they had to play these songs in an Australian weekly top 40 countdown, they’d make a derogatory comment like “and it’s amazing what you can do with trickery!” Nothing like that happened on American Top 40. The point is, the only way they’d play pop and dance music, no matter how popular, is if they had to, and even then they weren’t too happy about it.
1991 is not a good representation of what typically happened in the 1990’s and late 1980’s on Australian radio. In the second half of 1990, stations like 2DAY FM and FOX FM actually started to play a lot of pop and dance after 7PM daily and even a few of the more popular ones each hour during the day (e.g. Madonna). Triple M may have even done so in Sydney but not in Melbourne.
However, in the first half of 1991, at least here in Melbourne, FOX FM went all the way back to not playing them at all, except during countdowns etc. In fact they only kept playing those songs between 7 and 10PM because they turned it into a daily top 30 countdown show. Meanwhile, as FOX FM played less of this music, the other commercial FM stations started playing more of those songs, even Triple M! However, by winter of 1991 they also walked this back completely. Triple M went back to rock music, KZFM (Now Gold 104) adopted a Good Time Oldies format of 60’s and 70’s music, and TTFM (Now KIIS) went back to their classic hits music.
In regional areas things were different. Stations in some markets played a lot of this music during the day and sometimes even more at night, e.g. 2MG Mudgee, 3CS Colac. Some other stations played little or none, e.g. 3TR. In those days there was only one commercial station in most regional markets.
Some stations tried a hit music format in late 1990 or early 1991, e.g. KIX FM Canberra, 2NX Newcastle (when they converted to FM), but this didn’t work out too well so it didn’t last.
As the 90’s wore on, stations started playing a few of the safer pop and dance songs, e.g. some Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson and Londonbeat songs. By the early 2000’s, with the launch of Nova stations, some stations were playing more of this music, especially late at night, but later on in the decade they had walked this back somewhat.
It wasn’t until 2015 that Melbourne and Sydney had three stations with a hit music format of one kind or another - 2DAY/Fox, KIIS and Nova. We didn’t have three such stations in one city sine the 70’s.
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I’ve got this logo of 4BC from 1992, though it doesn’t really give anything away about what they were playing. For some reason I had in my head that they tried country music around this time, but I have got nothing to verify that. Might be a false memory!
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You’re correct,they did play country music around that time,can’t remember how long it lasted .
I must have been somewhere where I heard them during their brief foray with a country music format,because I remember this was when I first heard “Achy Breaky Heart” by Billy Ray Cyrus,a song hated by most members on here.For anyone not in the know,he’s Miley’s dad
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Maybe 2MMM, but 4MMM (as FM104) was pretty true to a rock format throughout the 80s. They did play softer rock like Suzanne Vega for example, but not Diana Ross (that I can recall anyway).
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Pop music was certainly frowned upon. There were newspaper reports around that time, probably late 80s, that 3XY was the only commercial station in Melbourne, possibly even Australia, playing Kylie Minogue as part of its overall playlist. i.e. not part of any countdown/requests/etc.
Eon FM/MMM of course had the Top 8 at 8 in the late 80s which was based on phone polling and very dance-heavy and usually had tracks come and go from its countdown weeks before they hit the mainstream charts. It was totally at odds with the rest of the station playlist which was heavy in guitar rock. It was the only timeslot I ever listened to Eon/MMM, as soon as the Top 8 was done I was back to 1422 
We sort of ended up with 4 FM stations all playing slight variations on the same thing, (TTFM with Classic Hits, Fox with Classic Hits but slightly younger, KZ with Hits and Memories, MMM with Hits and Memories but also slightly younger!) with 3XY really the only outlier in terms of younger people’s music. Then KZFM break away and go towards Gold 104 and focus heavily on 60s/70s and XY signed off, so anyone under the age of 30… good luck! Stations like Bay FM in Geelong and Sun FM in Shepparton were getting a bit of positive press for offering something a bit more contemporary for anyone in Melbourne lucky enough to ever receive them. (Bay Fm, maybe. Sun FM, no chance!)
Of course missing from a lot of this discussion was Triple J. Even though it started in Melbourne in 1989 it was only really ever an alternative voice and didn’t do much to address the total lack of youth focus from the commercial FMs. I am not sure why it wasn’t more aggressive in filling the gap left by the commercials, and it really left the door open for the spike in youth/top 40 community stations as this was just at the time that temporary community broadcasting licences were becoming available.
Finally anyone under the age of about 30 that wasn’t into obscure/alternative music had something to listen to when Hitz FM was the first TCBL as such in Melbourne, which then created a few rivals and even some splinter groups from ex-Hitz team members!
Then there was that bizarre time that Fox went full-on Classic Rock, and MMM went to pop and dance. Weird times! IIRC the Austereo/MMM merger soon saw that addressed and the stations swapped formats.
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That was a short lived campaign. I used to have the 1 minute commercial from that era on tape but not sure where it is now. It didn’t reveal if it was a music station or not only that it was centered around Brisbane. I get the impression it was talk.
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Yes there was a period of time when Top 40/CHR radio didn’t really exist in most places towards the end of the 80s and perhaps the very early 90s. At the time I remember regional stations were playing more new music than metro stations. Once Stereo 10 flipped to Lite & Easy there was no Top 40 station in Brisbane, and neighbouring stations like 4SS and 4GY (and even 4MB!!) played more new music than metro stations.
Personally I didn’t really mind because the very late 80s/early 90s wasn’t the best period for new music IMO and I was still totally into FM104s broad rock including soft/classic and selected new rock.
But to be fair it wasn’t just in Australia. The US went through a similar period, probably a few years earlier, where FM rock stations were taking over from dying Top 40 AM stations. Top 40 took a few years to establish itself on the FM dial. In Canada it was even more pronounced as FM stations weren’t allowed to target Top 40 youth audiences for a time.
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Apparently it was even happening in the UK, which I remember surprised me given that they had Radio 1 which was so huge. But apparently that was the back story behind the Stock Aitken Waterman produced song I’d Rather Jack.
“Weren’t allowed”?? Don’t tell me someone or government made a rule to deliberately exclude this demographic/genre??!
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You better believe it. It was partially removed in 1997 and fully in 2009
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that is incredible. I always thought the Brits were way over the top with broadcasting regulation. But the Canadians took it to another level 
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Would have made more sense to swap the call signs… So 101.9 Triple M and 105.1 The Fox
that would have been worse
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Triple M FM 101 doesn’t roll off the tongue.
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that was the weird period in 1996 when Triple M had a Triple J-esque format (even poaching Andy Glitre and his dance music show). It didn’t last two months and Triple M Melbourne reverted to rock after that and have been ever since.
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