Cheers,
Matt (’The Blogger’)

I work in triple j’s marketing department and have been reading all your comments with interest.

The blogger has idenitifed all the major challenges that we face, and we are in fact working on solutions for each and every one of them.

We would love to have a triple j-style Myspace! It’s a question of resources though. The station (unfortunately) can’t be everything to everyone and that includes being a retailer (which is precluded by our editorial policies in any event). Our platform for supporting unsigned Australian artists is enormously successful (I will post the latest stats here once I have compiled them), mostly becuase the incentives we offer (airplay, spots on festival bills/tours etc) are very attractive. We do have countless other measures for supporting new local talent.

In the next six months we’ll be launching some really exciting new initiatives that will enable greater interaction with our audience via social networking platforms and the like.

Stay tuned, thanks for your feedback, and if you have any other suggestions, feel free to drop me a line at collins.claire@abc.net.au

Cheers

Claire

In Queensland, if you’re a fan of local music it’s a badge of honour to list Triple J as your favourite radio station and have a drum sticker on the back of your car. Australia Day Hottest 100 parties are important traditions.

However, I’ve quickly come to realise that in Melbourne most serious music lovers wouldn’t be caught dead doing those things. In fact, they consider Triple J to be daggy and often cite the fact they have a rotation system as reason to tune out.

I recently filled out an application to go into the Meredith Musical Festival ticketing ballot. They asked you to tick your favourite radio station and Triple J wasn’t even listed as an option. The default option was RRR, which does seem to be what the cool kids down here listen to.

It seems odd that music lovers in Brisbane have such different taste to music lovers in Melbourne and makes me assume it comes down to brand marketing. What do you think they’re doing differently across the states?

Back to the Unearthed/MySpace thing, totally take the point on incentivising Unearthed listens and plays, I guess my feeling there is that’s a hard strategy to build upon. 1000 downloads, played on radio. OK now what? 2000 downloads and…get played again? Competing on scale is a short term strategy, and there are more ears available for your music on MySpace than there are on Unearthed.

What it needs are regular incentives that are compelling enough for bands to continually promote themselves through Unearthed and for that site itself to be seen as a viable option for career progression.

Here’s an idea - what if every tour that was “Proudly supported by Triple J” had an Unearthed act either on the road or at least opening for the band when it was in a town? OK, odds are pretty good that band would already have something on the Unearthed site, some extra attention in the podcast, on the Unearthed site and on the radio in the week leading up to it would be great, and cost Triple J very little in terms of monetary outlay.

For anyone on the Unearthed site, getting heard is absolutely paramount, their initiatives should focus on that.

The point I was trying to make with Unearthed is that it can offer more of an incentive (ie. national radio play to the most popular artists, or cash via a retail system) for bands to list their tracks than MySpace can. If they knew they’d get national airplay if 1,000 people downloaded their MP3 from Unearthed, they’d send fans there rather than to their MySpace. My point is that if Australian bands started choosing Unearthed as the place to showcase their music, the fans would have to follow and MySpace would go back to being just another way for teenagers to perve on each other.

And I’m not suggesting for a second that Triple J change and become mainstream, I’m suggesting that Triple J start finding ways of making the mainstream change their views of what music is worthy of attention. It’s about time the tail started trying to wag the dog.

I also feel if Triple J made a move to change the mainstream, it would be an exercise in redundancy. It exists to offer an alternative to the commercial stations and, at the end of the day, is not remunerated for promoting bands, it just plays what it plays. Ultimately if a song is popular enough it will slowly transition onto some Nova stations and then eventually Austereo, such is the progression in this country (and the model plays out the same everywhere else) and we are delivered the notion of a “cross-over” hit.

What Triple J should be doing, rather than create another walled-garden music site, is looking at initiatives like Google’s Open Social and working more closely with the likes of MySpace. There’s an opportunity for branded content already being leveraged on TV and in print, the interesting part for me is extending this notion of authority into other areas. Whereas online we have so many wannabe thought-leaders (and I’m holding a mirror up as I say that), notions of authenticity can still be leveraged in offline media, and Triple J have that in spades.

I say:

- syndicate to overseas stations interested in Australian music; there’s surely heaps of space to fill in digital radio in the US
- Do content deals with Australian-themed pubs in the UK

- The Big Day Out is already a Triple-J tour (as are most Australian festivals), why not take the show into other avenues like “South By Southwest: Triple J presents…”

- A weekly Unearthed new music podcast (forgive me if they already do this, I don’t listen to radio ;]) where artists agree to have their music included for free but are supplied data on the location of people who downloaded it or overseas stations who played it and then are able to use that data to market more of their music to the people who are already listening.

I’ll keep thinking, but in the meantime my iPod calls and I have lots of work to do =]