Interesting. That will mean SCA will have to divest one of the stations in Bunbury, as they will own 3 (Triple M, Hit & Spirit).
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The deal will expand SCA’s WA footprint. How many stations will SCA own across the state?
Grant Broadcasters or EON should buy 6EL (Spirit Southwest).
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Maybe West Coast Radio (owner of The Wave/Coast Mandurah) could buy 6EL.
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Would be an interesting move if they did. I heard West Coast were trying to get out of radio, this was a few years ago. Grant Broadcasters has a share in Coast FM and The Wave apparently. There was talk that SCA wanted to buy Mandurah, fortunately that won’t happen now.
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I really hope SCA keep the current music format on Spirit. That narrow bland “ Music That Feels Good” music format would not work in these remote areas where they are listening to the radio 12 hours straight. This is where the current music format on Spirit works well.
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Yes, Grant Broadcasters own 9.36% of West Coast Radio
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Well poo.
Spirit is pretty good, with pretty good localism last time I checked. I’m pretty sure the main centres (Gero, Karratha, Port Hedland, Broome, Bunbury) are local from breakfast to the end of the afternoon, and remote is all from Perth (understandable, we are talking REALLY remote).
I think Red FM has one main feed in all regions from Geraldton, then they take the Nova drive show and Fitzy and Wippa highlights before a Red FM night show from Geraldton. Not as local as Spirit though.
I suspect Red FM will become Hit FM, which is already one feed out of Bunbury, which mostly takes the national Hit logs and programs except for a Bunbury breakfast.
Spirit will probably become Triple M, which is a little more local than Hit in that most regions have their own breakfast. I wonder if Triple M will keep the Spirit breakfasts?
I assume SCA will get all the transmitters, and all the mine sites too, just to sell them straight off to BA.
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Red FM is all out of Perth. Geraldton may be the only exception with a local daytime shift to meet content requirements.
I would expect the Spirit local breakfasts to continue - the other Triple M stations in WA also have local breakfasts so it’s part of their formula. Anything “local” on spirit outside on breakfast is automated or voice tracked - they only employ one announcer in each market with a few network announcers in Perth.
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You’re right, my bad, Red FM breakfast is out of Perth. Geraldton has a 10-2 local, according to their local content statement, and that probably goes out to the other areas.
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This all sucks; it really takes the Spirit out of regional WA radio. If I lived there, I’d definitely be seeing Red, and want to Hit the wall (like Mitchell Marsh did). But maybe meditation would be the best response… MMM…
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Watch this space 
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Will be interesting to see what someone does with it - it’s never been run independent of a network, only a few local staff and #3 commercial in the market (based on the 2016 survey as it wasn’t included in 2019 - although the numbers look roughly similar) it’s unlikely to have a huge sales base. Remove the support of state-wide network sales it will need a lot of work on the sales front and to rebuild a content roster without the networked programs.
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The transaction price is unlikely to be publicly available, however, it will be interesting if it’s sold at a price reflecting the current status (small, but not minuscule) or speculative (more).
As with 6MM in 1988 and almost the s.39 in Bridgetown, Bunbury’s third commercial licence was allocated to an AM frequency due to the FM band sandwiched with both the commercial and ABC TV licenses within Band II.
It’s likely the forthcoming ACMA FM reallocation in WA will identify FM allocations for both 6EL (Spirit Radio, WAN) and 6TZ (MMM, SCA).
The future owner of 6EL has the opportunity to transform their license similarly to West Coast Radio for 91.7 The Wave with much less than the 30 year wait they endured.
Again, the lack of sensible digital radio policy has hurt both owners within the Bunbury market for years now. If the industry had been technology agnostic (supportive of all digital mediums), a regional market such as Bunbury could have had levelled their playing field much sooner with 6EL and 6TZ on AM running DRM+
This would have given them one audio channel similar to FM quality with potentially, a far greater reach, possibly reducing the need for translators for all but the most far flung sites towards Margaret River and Augusta.
With the incumbent licensee, 6TZ paired with 6BUN/Hot/Hit, successive owners from Rural Press, DMG, MRRW and SCA have never bothered as the FM revenue from 6BUN would be considered ‘enough’.
Another example of the downward turn of the commercial sector as it has devolved from being entrepreneurial to obsessing with cost savings at all levels.
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I’d suggest that 6EL is worth more as part of the Spirit Network than it will be on its own. Gives SCA an opportunity to weaken its competition though.
Might the brief period while they own all 3 licences be an opportunity for SCA to lobby to get both AM station’s on FM. It might give 6EL a better chance of success (which would naturally be against their wishes) but would also afford the same opportunity to Triple M. Alternatively, they could try to get Triple M converted to FM and leave 6EL on AM, but ids have though the ACMA would be less supportive of such an anticompetitive move.
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Most “logical” (of a limited choice) would be Capital to acquire with 6iX offering some opportunity of networking and leveraging the Forever Classic format, along with a sales force to access Perth based media buyers.
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Indeed. Quite a limited choice.
It’s a pity West Coast don’t have an appetite for expansion. It’s an adjacent market with the northern sections receiving the Mandurah FM signals quite well.
With John and the team successfully picking the format hole in the Perth choices to program The Wave, similar could be done in Bunbury and at a very low cost.
Back to Capital, not having listened to 6IX recently, approx how much of the client load sounds is direct and what is likely agency/media buyers?
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Move FM 99.5 and 2LT 101.1 are both suffering from lagging audio.
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I met the tech who looks after 2LT/MoveFM a week or so ago, unfortunately I didn’t get to ask him much about those stations as we were discussing other work, but he briefly mentioned NBN.Co have offered Fixed wireless services at Mt Lambie & Wallerawang for both sites, but he said no thanks they’ll stick with the 4G services they have. I don’t know if that meant they use 4G for telemetry or actually feed the sites off 4G?
They have ACMA licenced STL’s going between the sites though, but maybe they use 4G as a backup feed?
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There’s always next time 