Commercial load of digital only Smooth in Adelaide and Brisbane is minimal.
News, weather and traffic content would be a helpful addition.
People (most) don’t want to listen to radio stations that don’t sound like what they expect for radio, requires live info such as the above suggestion.
This article explains how SCA monetised their digital stations:
Basically by aligning them with the networks, they offer the aligned stations to existing advertisers for the same cost per thousand listeners.
Nova Entertainment could easily offer the same for national advertisers of smooth, but it would be harder to get local advertisers given that it’s a largely unknown brand in those markets.
I might be dumb, but I don’t get the concept. A woman tells Sam Smith to stop singing because she wants to relax, then puts on an even more ear piercing Sam Smith song to do her relaxing? Does she not know who he is when he opens the door? Why is Sam allowed that many people in his hotel room? When Sam is in Sydney does he Love Nova or relax with Smooth? I’m far from relaxed.
Personally, I think the new ad for Smooth FM is not particularly better or worse than what they launched the station with…
Woman comes home to relax and turns on Smooth FM with Michael Buble’s “Just Haven’t Met You Yet” playing, Buble walks into the room and starts singing, but the woman wants him to shut up so she can listen to the music playing on the radio. WTF? If I was a female fan of Michael Buble, I’d probably love to have him in the room!
That message (which I’m guessing is what they are going for) works with the first one, with Buble at least calmly crooning around her kitchen. Smooth is better.
For the Sam Smith one they’re comparing a rave in a hotel room with a calm radio station. The woman wants to relax of course she is going to choose the latter. Smooth: more relaxing than a hotel mosh.
But then also Smooth plays tracks that are hotel-room-party-worthy? That doesn’t sound very relaxing.
This following link below should help answer your question.
From my brief listening recently, Smooth doesn’t seem to play much from the 60s & 70s compared to before, in which it’s now more 80s to Today, almost in the same league as WS & Gold.
According to a recent research on Sydney music radio crossovers, Smooth & WS shared 17.2% of the music played, with the former playing more unique tracks than the latter (44.8% vs 38.0%).
Smooth is now playing pre-roll ads on the Smooth app and on Radioapp. It’s somewhat annoying because if Optus momentarily drops out and the buffer runs out an ad will play again when the app reconnects. Same thing happens if I change stations on Radioapp then later change back to Smooth. iHeartRadio also plays pre-roll ads but it’s not all the time, only sporadically, and it never plays an ad after the network drops out then reconnects.
The 80s and 90s are ok but a bit repetitive with the playlists. They could be a bit more adventurous IMO. And the constant iHeart promos are very annoying.
They’re over being adventurous, they’ve won the certain slice of Magic audience over they needed to and it’s gone narrow. Typical radio tactic, same done with Nova, sounded different, now sounds bland.
And lack of digital radio promos? Frustrates me, same with the KQ news lead-in, AM & iHeart, no digital. They’ll have only themselves to blame with poor digital take up.
And again, Nova Ent are not interested in the presenters.
That’s a great reason why it doesn’t grab me with pre recorded nights and weekends and everything else running virtual live. Localism and immediacy lost.