Wheatley banks on Stripes

26Jul08

Source: Bernard Zuel, Sydney Morning Herald

He brought FM to Australia. Now the music industry
veteran plans to bombard listeners with radio opportunities.

Glenn Wheatley knows we are not exactly short of radio options
in Sydney. You can listen to more than two dozen stations, half of
them claiming to be music stations, though their bombardment of
commercials, inane announcers, severely restricted playlists and
risk aversion suggest music is anything but their focus.

It sounds more than enough, but Wheatley is banking on your
wanting 30, 40 or even 100 more – and being happy to pay for
it.

The 40-year veteran of the music industry who has managed John
Farnham and Delta Goodrem – made and lost a fortune and last year
became a prominent casualty of a crackdown on tax evasion for which
he was sentenced to 30 months’ jail – is the leading figure behind
Stripe, which next month will begin a national radio network
operating online and via mobile phones.

The subscription-based Stripe will offer stations devoted to
single genres, including Christian music and hard rock, dance music
and country, current hits and decade-specific oldies. It will start
with 30 stations but Wheatley, who is serving the balance of his
jail term under home detention in Melbourne, plans another 10
before the end of this year and up to 100 by the end of next year,
including talk, news, sport and weather channels.

That sound you hear could be the commercial music stations
hitting the panic button, which makes the synchronicity of today’s
announcement even more acute for Wheatley. On July 11, 1980, the
Wheatley-founded EON FM went to air as the first commercial FM
radio station in Australia. The move revolutionised broadcasting
(and made Wheatley, his associates and several others who started
FM stations, seriously rich), as the former musician knew it would
after one of his acts, the Little River Band, broke through in the
US in the late 1970s thanks to FM stations which were not bound by
the singles and hits-driven music stations on the AM band.

A similar epiphany occurred several years ago for Wheatley and
his wife, Gaynor – whom he credits with driving Stripe while he was
in jail – when on another trip to the US they came across satellite
radio. "I couldn’t live without it. It was in my hire cars, it was
a way of life where you could pick whatever genre of music you
wanted and enjoy yourself. I came back to Australia thinking I
wonder if I can bring satellite radio to Australia."

The short answer was no. Apart from listeners needing special receivers to access the signal, launching a satellite and establishing ground stations cost millions of dollars.

Wheatley’s solution was to use online streaming and the 3G telephone network being rolled out across Australia by the telecommunication companies.

"The rollout costs are being borne by them," Wheatley notes. "This is not new technology – this is telephony, deadly simple. We are not convincing anybody to go out and buy a $300 handset as they had to do in America – they’ve already got a phone. And it can actually work on 2G, though 3G will be the dominant format in Australia soon."

Jarrod Graetz, Stripe’s head of programming, has a background in commercial radio but describes that as being more focused on money than listeners. Stripe’s difference, he says, is that it will give listeners more choice.

"They want to be able to flick between all the different genres and know that wherever they land they will get that type of music every single time they go to that station," says Graetz.

He compares the playlist for one of Stripe’s decade-specific stations, about 900 songs, with the 500 songs of a classic-hits commercial station.

More tellingly perhaps, certainly for the record companies backing this start-up against the much complained-about, free-to-air radio system, is the information that will become available on listeners and their tastes.

"What we’re really, really excited about is we are able to see what listeners are listening too, where they are, how long they listen for," Graetz says.

"We can see if they flick off a station, if they flick off a particular song. So if there’s a trend with a particular song, we know that that song is not highly liked in comparison with other songs that don’t get switched off as much. That’s the unique user data which we are about to start seeing. That’s going to revolutionise radio and we are one of the first people in the world to use that data."

So is this the beginning of the end for broadcast radio? Will Stripe expand the pool of potential listeners or cannibalise what is there now? Wheatley thinks both are possible.

"We are going to pull some business away, there is no doubt about that, as FM radio did," he says. "But people will always have a radio, in the same way that free-to-air TV has learned to live with pay TV. I expect there will be some resistance from [commercial radio] early on, but I like to think that at the end of the day we are radio."

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