WHO FEARS TO SPEAK OF 98?

It’s been a turbulent year in Irish radio. While some independent local stations consolidated after a shaky start, the Dublin scene hotted up with the resurgence of FM 104, the continued commercial success of 98FM and the introduction of two new operators in Anna Livia and Radio Na Life.

At times the competition reached intense, if slightly ludicrous, proportions, with reports, for example, of one Dublin station’s staff giving out promotional vouchers to motorists and their rivals buying them back at the next set of traffic-lights!

On the more serious side there was a general realisation that the ‘choice’ promised by Ray Burke when he sold us his original bill introducing independent radio here in 1988, had not been the delivered. There was uproar too about the growing feeling that Irish radio in general and some stations in particular, were operating anti-Irish music policies, a worrying state of affairs that lead to the setting-up of the Jobs In Music campaign.

Then came the wholesale changes at the much-maligned IRTC and an indication by Minister Michael D. Higgins that he was favourably disposed to the imposition of some kind of minimum quota for Irish music; this was accompanied by a request to the JIM committee to submit their definition of ‘Irish’ music to him.

All of this, and more, must be of concern to 98FM’s JEFF O’BRIEN as he prepares to deal with whatever other changes may be in store – but at least he is operating from a position of strength in that 98FM is regarded, even by it’s detractors, as the commercial success story of independent radio to date.

O’Brien himself hails from Australia, is married to a New Zealander and they recently celebrated the birth of their first child, a Dubliner! He started in Australian radio as a presenter but later moved into programming. Some time time later he was asked if he would be prepared to move abroad, and he subsequently spent three years in New Zealand radio. Then came the opportunity to move to Dublin to assist in setting up 98FM.

JACKIE HAYDEN: Was it much of a culture shock moving to Ireland? After all, the Irish stereotype is rather laid-back, while Australians are assumed to be more ‘bullish’.

JEFF O’BRIEN: I was lucky in spending three years in New Zealand before I came here and I see many simularities between the two countries, in terms of size, population, and lifestyle. Culturally, New Zealand is just about as far away as you can get from Australia. So by the time I got to Ireland I thought I could take anything on, because in New Zealand they have a bit of a chip on the shoulder about Australians, so when I first met Irish people I found them very easy to deal with!

What did you find you liked and disliked about Ireland?

I think the Irish attitude to other people is great. It’s a stunning, beautiful country. It’s also, to an Australian, very close to so many other places like the U.K. and other European countries which we would rarely get the chance to visit. I’ve been to beautiful places I’d never even heard of.

What have you not liked about Ireland?

I’d think I’d like the Irish to be a little more honest. They have a tendency to say one thing and sometimes mean another and that takes a bit of getting used to! But after being here for four years I can pretty well read what they mean.

Almost right from the start, compared to other stations, 98FM seemed to get it right in a strictly commercial sense. Why do you think this was, while so many others struggled?

I’d been lucky. Up to 1984 Australian radio was very much as it had been here. A lot of stations just experimented and quite often we got a lot of things wrong, although we never knew why. A lot of stations took horse-racing, for example, whereas very few do now. If you played music that a lot of people did not like, there was no way of knowing how many or why.

So what changed?

Some say that when research comes along you take the fun out of radio, because a lot of people running the programmes have their own ideas they want to push on people. But all research is basically doing is asking people what they want to listen to and if you give that to the majority of those people then you pretty well have it right. We ask people what they want, and if we play something they don’t want, we’ll probably fail. I think that’s why we got the jump on everybody else.

The criticism of that approach isn’t only that it takes the fun out of radio, but that it takes the human element out too. For example, maybe listeners would like occasionally to hear something that, say, Mark Cagney himself likes. Equally one has to ask how can research tell you what people think of records they have never heard in the first place?

These are very good questions, and the only answer I can give you is that around 18 months ago we took the view that Mark could include some of his favourite songs in his slot and ironically, perhaps coincidentally, his figures took a bit of a dip. When he stopped doing that he went back up again! Equally, about two and a half years ago, we got a lot of that same criticism from advertising agencies, saying that while they believed all our figures, they felt that if we kept doing it like we were doing, it was going to become stale and boring.

We thought about this for a long time and we took the view that we were going to lessen the sixties content and freshen the station with lots of changes, and we did, even though our research told us not to. As a result we went from about 27 or 28 to 23 and it really scared the life out of us. Our own tracking was telling us that we had promised one thing and were not delivering.

So what was your response?

When we came along first we were probably the only station catering for people aged 25 to 44. Now there are three stations doing it so we have to be even more meticulous. We’d be very nervous about breaking our promise on anything at the moment. In saying that we have made some changes. Some, I can honestly say, were brought about by Hot Press and I don’t think that’s a bad thing either. There was a campaign against 98FM about our Irish content and if I could play more Irish songs that suited us I would. Most Australian stations would play a fair percentage of Australian music anyway, but in the late seventies and into the eighties Australian bands conformed to what people wanted to hear most. Jimmy Barnes, for example, who has played in Dublin, he was a real hell-raiser, but now he’d be their number one artist on the adult contemporary market like Phil Collins in this part of the world.

What changes did you make?

We’ve introduced programmes that we would never have done at the beginning, like the Top Ten at six on Sunday afternoons, which has had a fantastic reaction, better than we ever hoped. The Top Seven at seven now goes for an hour because we’ve included elements of Irish music with Philip Dargan and he also includes some in the Sunday programme. We now have a programme on Sunday night called Living In The Seventies with Jim O’Neill, and Jim gets in as many Irish hits of the period as he can. I have to say about that campaign that we didn’t like was pointed against us.

I don’t think that campaign was directed solely at 98FM, but there was a growing dissatisfaction about the general shape of Irish radio and as the perceived market leaders at the time it was probably inevitable that you would be in the firing line?

I think maybe we were a little slow to react to that. We were very nervous at the time, well when I say nervous, I mean we were conscious about making too many changes because there was a re-launched station coming after our part of the market and 2FM had said likewise. Too many changes too quickly could have been disastrous, but our commitment is to increase the Irish element as much as we can.

In what way?

When a new Irish song comes out now we’ll often high-rotate it before we even get research on it, which we certainly would not have done before your campaign! (laughs).

I notice that with Jim O’Neill’s new seventies programme the spech content is noticeably higher than normal for 98FM – is that an experiment or a new trend?

That programme is intended not only to reflect the music of the era, but, for example, if there’s an artist in town relevant to that era, say Gary Glitter, we would now try and get that guy for an interview. Jim is really good at that sort of thing.

Why focus on the seventies?

The seventies was an interesting era because if you talk about the great music, there wasn’t a lot of great music in the seventies, not like the sixties, or in my opinion the eighties and now the nineties, but there were a lot of things, perhaps more than the music, that made that era unique. So if you do a programme on the seventies, you can’t get by just on the music.

When you were being criticised for the lack of Irish content, a lot of people felt that you were surprisingly sensitive to criticism, which after all is part and parcel of the music scene and the media business and that instead of responding positively, you responded rather negatively?

I don’t suppose anybody really likes criticism and we decided initially that if we said nothing and did nothing, but let it lie for a while. We were not trying to hide from it, but what could I have said that had not already been said by others ?

There has also been criticism that promises were made by 98FM and others, promises on the basis of which licenses were awarded, and which have not been fulfilled.

The submissions for this company were made a long time before I arrived here. By that time, Capital and Century were on the air as well as several smaller stations and none of them were working except Capital, which had gained a good market-share of 15–19-year-olds. When I met the commission I maintained that if we were going to settle on a target audience of 25-34, with a secondary target of 20-24, we had to be different from RTE Radio 1 and, more importantly, 2FM. I had to convince the IRTC, that having researched 6,ooo people in the city, unless we did it this way, we would become another Century, which even at that time I could tell was going nowhere.

What about the suspicion that you said all the right things to get the license, but then did something totally different and that people have a right to feel cheated?

That’s something I can’t answer, because that wasn’t my brief with the company. My brief was to have a successful station both in listenership terms and profitability and to mantain the employment of upwards of thirty people. Now we have a staff of fifty full-time, apart from a lot of part-time staff.

What kind of relationship have you had with the IRTC?

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that we’ve had our ups and downs. But probably none of those ups and downs have been as a result of 98FM. We went through a stage when a number of the small stations were in a little trouble and they approached us to get involved in a programming sense as well as financially and in a management function. We thought we could do that, and it went to the full board of the IRTC and it was pointed out that according to our license agreement we were not allowed to expand. But it was a cloudy issue. The person we’d earlier spoken to at the IRTC felt that we could expand. We were well down the road in Galway and elsewhere, and at the end of the day we had to walk away from it and that was very hard to do.

Given your admission earlier about the criticism of 98FM in Hot Press and the way it prompted you to make some changes, how do you view the appointment of Niall Stokes as Chairman of the IRTC?

I’m looking forward to it. We have a tremendous relationship with the IRTC at the moment, especially with the secretary Mick O’Keeffe and I think he’s done a tremendous job, not only in keeping stations fairly strict to their commitments, like the 20% news and current affairs, and that’s a tough job for him to do. He’s been very supportive of the independent sector.

Have you had much contact with Michael D. Higgins?

Our Chairman Denis O’Brien certainly has and has found him no problem. Great .

You talked earlier about researching your music choice, but you do not need to research what news items to carry. Why the difference?

Well that’s not true! We research everything that happens on the station based on the age-range 20 to 44, including what people like or don’t like about our news and what priority we should give in our news. I don’t want to give too many secrets away, but for example, we’ve found that for people aged 20-44 the number one topic option is Dublin, and everyday human interest stories. In sport we also did some research to find out what were that market’s top ten sports and we were astonished to find that the second most popular sport in Dublin with that age group was Tennis! As a result we would have to pay more attention to what’s happening in the world of Tennis. So we research everything.

But if news comes in right now about, say, a major earthquake in Florida, somebody in your newsroom can make a professional decision as to whether your listeners should be told about it. So one wonders why the same process cannot apply to music whereby a professional person, with adequate experience and a knowledge of both music and your market, cannot do likewise?

I think that if, say, a Phil Collins song comes in we by and large know, without researching it, that it’s pretty well going to be a smash. Equally, if you look at ‘Move It On Up’, by M People, which we’re playing a lot now, it’s become a smash for us, but there’s no way we would have played that record a year ago. Dance music has shifted to appeal to people aged 25 to 44. It’s become more poppy and I think M People is a great example of that. We thoroughly researched ‘Mr Vain’ by Culture Beat. We played it at night-time, but it had too many negatives to cross over into daytime, but it was a close one! Now in another twelve months, who knows, Mr Vain may be played on this radio station, but it’s not for us to do that right now across the day.

Does playing M People mean your’e taking more of a risk these days?

No, I think two things have happened. One is that those 20-year-olds became 25’s and their tastes have influenced the market and secondly I think that some of the dance artists are more poppy rather than dance-y.

When Century was in serious trouble, there was a suggestion that part of RTE’s licence fee should be diverted into the independent sector, but either yourself or Denis went on RTE radio and said that 98FM was doing so well that you didn’t need any money. Do you have any regrets about that now?

(laughing) It was me who said it actually, not Denis. No, no regrets, and in all honesty, Mick O’Keeffe has said to me quite openly that even if a portion of the licence fee was available to-morrow, they’d be very cautious about who it went to and I agree with that. I think there will come a time when RTE1 and 2FM won’t gain anything out of the licence fee. It’s happened in most other countries. In New Zealand, the people in radio who get the licence fee are non-commercial and I feel that has to happen here in the future, and reading between the lines I think there are a lot of changes at RTE as well. It’s been in the papers, and I can see a shift. I mean, you can’t go on propping up commercial entities. That’s what we are, a private commercial company, we can’t sit back and hope for hand-outs, we’ve got to get out there and fight for it and survive on our own. The company knew that before I came along.

Would 98FM succeed as a commercial national station with income from advertising alone, whereas your main competitor RTE would have revenue from the licence as well?

Two years ago I would have been supremely confident.

So what’s changed?

I still believe we could make it happen, but it would be tougher because a lot of the local stations have by now built up their own loyalty in their areas and in some provincial areas there is an anti-Dublin feeling, which is normal. It happens in Australia and elsewhere. In Galway, for example, they were very proud of their local station. That’s what local radio should aspire to.

Would that suggest that there is no likelihood of a national competitor for RTE, and that the whole Century thing was a mistake?

No. It wasn’t a mistake at the time. I just think that the wrong people were there.

So it could have worked?

Absolutely. I have no doubt that an independent network would have worked, the same as I believe that TV3 would work.

How do you feel about the argument that radio should be de-regulated and allow anyone to open a station, with perhaps minimal control over wavelengths?

Well, I think that radio is already de-regulated to a huge extent and if you don’t succeed you close down, like any other business.

But if you want to start a newspaper to-morrow, you can do it. If someone wants to start a radio station they can’t. Why should radio stations be protected from competition?

The facts of the matter are that right throughout Europe and elsewhere, we’re becoming a very electronic world and to find a frequency that is free in Europe, say, is very, very difficult. Poland is going through this problem at the moment because they’re de-regulating but they’ve come to a standstill almost, because there are literally no frequencies free. I don’t know how we’re going to get around this problem. When we got our frequency in Prague, which we were very lucky to get, we were the 19th of about 24 stations and we had a choice of about three frequencies. One of them had to be operated on low power which most of Prague would not have been able to receive. It had to be kept low because it was too close to the airport frequency! When people talk of the independent sector sharing the licence fee, I don’t think the money should go to the stations, that’s up to them to succeed, but it could go to help supplement the cost of distributing the signals.

I mentioned de-regulation because in Norway, which has a similar population to Ireland, they apparently have two or three hundred stations. Once there’s a free frequency available, one person can operate a station out of a suitcase if they so choose and if it works, fine, and if it closes then someone else gets the frequency.

There are about eighty stations in Copenhagen with a population similar to Dublin, but they sometimes operate on a shared frequency basis, with different stations using the same frequency at different times of the day for an agreed number of hours. You can only allow that kind of proliferation if the stations operate on low power so as to minimise interference. That’s why I think it needs to be controlled.

How do view the resurgence of pirate stations in Ireland?

Even if a pirate station picks up only a small percentage of listeners, that’s a lost opportunity for a legitimate station. I’m surprised that they’re allowed to continue.

Would you like to see the IRTC close them down?

Well, the IRTC can’t. But the Department of Communications can.

So why don’t they?

I don’t know. (laughs).

But would it not be in your interest to pressurise them into closing them down?

I think if they were becoming a nuisance we would take some sort of action. But at the moment I see it as some people having a bit of fun at night-time on a very low-powered frequency and at this stage they certainly haven’t hurt 98FM. In the future, if they were having an affect on us, we would be mad commercially not to take some action, but at the moment they just don’t have any affect on us, so we don’t care much about them. Of the ones I’ve heard, their music is not something 98FM would do. But if a pirate started using a classic hits format and it started eating into our market we’d take the necessary steps to stop it.

When you operate such a rigid format as 98FM are there any times when something big breaks and you wish you could clear the airwaves and devote perhaps a whole hour to it?

What I would love to be able to do is play more rock music on 98FM because that’s where my heart is, yet every time we try to get a rock song away the research comes screaming back at us. That’s frustrating.

Is that not the sort of thing you could then fit in at week-ends, or late at night, maybe to experiment with a rock show?

Well, we’ve certainly talked about it. Jim O’Neill’s seventies programme certainly gets into pretty rocky numbers and it’s working great for us, being able to play say, Noddy Holder. You know, he can really let a guitar fly!

We were offered ‘great choice’ when Ray Burke brought in his radio bill, but that choice didn’t materialise. The range of music played on most stations is almost identical.

Well, if I was between 15 and 19, I guess I’d feel a little frustrated. It’s gone from one extreme to the other. When I came here in 1989 there were three stations playing what I call music for kids and an older station doing talk shows and nobody in the middle and that’s where we positioned ourselves. So in my opinion there was choice then. But we came along, we instantly became successful with the 25-44’s and picked up large numbers of 20-24’s and the others started to follow us, including stations around the country. Now there is really nothing for the young person. I’d like to get going here with another licence if that was possible and target the young end, but not too young.

Did Capital not try to fill that gap before it became Rock 104?

They claimed they couldn’t make money out of it. But I think that’s where the radio of the future might be.

It now seems that BBC radio is more interested in Irish records than most of our own stations. Isn’t it an appalling indictment of some elements of Irish radio that we are more likely to hear our artists on the network of another state than on our own? I hope people in Australia don’t have to turn to New Zealand radio to hear Australian artists . . .

It’s frustrating I know, but whether it’s Ireland or Australia or Florida, radio is currently taking the safe course. A lot more people are getting into radio and treating it as a business, whereas there was a time when people did it for all sorts of reasons, maybe for egotistical reasons, it might be a tax-dodge or they might have been radio anaracks. Now you have to run it like a business.

What reasons would you give to persuade listeners to tune in to 98FM?

First and foremost, familiarity. We don’t go out of our way to upset people. We endeavour to hire jocks who are warm and friendly on the air and non-confrontational and to give Dublin listeners the feeling that it’s their radio station.

Given a magic wand, what changes would you like to make either to Irish radio in general or to 98FM?

(long pause) I think if it could be a little more adventurous and we’re searching for that ourselves. Something has to change. I think in the next 12 to 18 months will see a lot of changes but I’m very optimistic about the future.