Inside Irish radio: how an upbeat market is vying to stay cheery

Ryan Tubridy may have recapped his CV and purred to Chris Evans about the red electric Vespa gifted to him by U2, but his Instagrammed midweek cameo on Virgin Radio UK was also a reminder of something less smooth. Not everyone gets to leave the Irish airwaves, as Today FM’s Dermot Whelan did, amid studio cheers and blasts of Beautiful Day.

In a business that can bring discordant exits even for voices not caught up in pay scandals, Whelan’s own-terms departure last month leapt out from the nation’s speakers. Played a “kick in the feels” tribute montage, the co-host of midmorning show Dermot & Dave joked about knowing “what it feels like to be dead”, hailed the now Bauer-owned national station as “just such a fun playground”, then declared he was “off to cry and drink champagne”.

The upshot is that on the two biggest stations in the market, Radio 1 and Today FM, it is now all change at 9am on weekdays – the “day part” that bore the largest available audience across the market before the pandemic and has only swelled in importance for Irish radio since then.

“The audience would probably prefer Ryan at nine and Dermot & Dave at nine, but there’s a colossal opportunity there for someone. It’s a cracking opportunity,” says Dan Healy, the head of RTÉ 2FM and an industry veteran.

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While Dave Moore is already flying solo in his bid to hang on to Dermot & Dave’s listenership – a record high of 216,000 for the three-hour show – as Whelan focuses on his Mind Full brand, RTÉ is still meditating on its permanent succession plan for the man who had 334,000 listeners between 9am-10am at the last count.

Healy, who thinks it is possible that both stations will now see a “knock” in listeners, says he has given his view to director general Kevin Bakhurst but is not party to the decision.

In any case, while he identifies 9am as “an interesting battle” and Chris Doyle, interim chief executive of Bauer Media Audio Ireland, confirms weekday midmorning is “the most competitive time slot”, the question of what comes next for Irish radio is, naturally, a much broader one.

The future shape of the industry, dependent on its accessibility to listeners and power to recruit new ones, hinges on how an ongoing technological shift plays out.

“There’s still a solid 10 years left in FM, and the revenue will hold up,” predicts Healy.

[ Brendan O’Connor overtakes Ryan Tubridy in JNLR radio listenership survey ]

Indeed, the audibly brighter industry mood echoes a turnaround in advertising fortunes: after a market-beating climb of 9 per cent to €158 million last year, radio revenues rose a further 3 per cent in the first half of 2023 at a time when the total advertising market was flat.

Admittedly, the second quarter was “more challenging” than the first, but this was true for all media, says Ciarán Cunningham, the former media agency boss who now leads cross-industry group Radiocentre Ireland.

Radio, including stations’ digital audio platforms, represents 13 per cent of the ad cake – a larger share than many expected pre-Covid, when stations were urging advertisers to “rethink” their attitude and agencies were calling on stations to make “radical” overhauls to swerve the same fate as print.

The confidence that rose along with soaring pandemic-era listenership figures has, like the listener numbers, largely been retained.

“It kind of gave us a renewed respect for our medium,” says Gabrielle Cummins, chief executive of Beat 102 103, a youth-targeting regional station in the southeast that is majority owned by The Irish Times group.

Irish radio didn’t just have a good pandemic, it had a busy one, with German media conglomerate Bauer arriving in 2021 through the acquisition of Denis O’Brien’s Communicorp group to join Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless and RTÉ in a “big three”.

Since buying Today FM, Newstalk, 98FM, Spin 1038 and Spin Southwest, Bauer has added Cork’s Red FM to its stable and also recently announced the acquisition of both iRadio – a youth music station serving the northeast, midlands and northwest – and radio sales house Media Central.

Bauer has been a clear winner in listenership trends both during and since the pandemic – for instance, the latest Joint National Listenership Research (JNLR) shows Today FM is hitting its best numbers in more than a decade – which Doyle attributes to both “consistent” marketing and a content strategy that resonates with audiences.

Exposed to news fatigue, RTÉ Radio 1′s Covid gains have been erased, while its radio trading performance in 2022 was more subdued than the market’s, with revenues up just 1.2 per cent as the unwinding of Government public health messaging led to a decline in spot advertising, offset by sponsorship growth. But the station is still sitting on a 19.8 per cent market share. At RTÉ, it is always 2FM that catches the flak.

[ The Irish music scene is diverse and thriving. But you’d never know it to listen to Irish radio ]

“BBC Radio 1 has a similar share to 2FM’s, but you don’t often hear people say ‘shut down Radio 1′,” says Healy.

Bakhurst, asked directly by journalists in July, has said he doesn’t see a case for offloading 2FM – for which €2.60 of each €160 licence fee is used – but he also didn’t rule it out.

“If you say RTÉ's core remit is over 55s, then off you go. If you say RTÉ's remit is also to serve younger audiences, then 2FM does a good job in that,” says Healy. The director general has been “supportive”, he reports.

“Kevin has been in 2FM four times in six weeks.”

Is that good?

“Honestly, it’s brilliant,” he says. “We can see this external stuff all the time at 2FM, but we know the job we’re doing. We know the job we have to do.”

Everyone at the station is “a workaholic” and the station itself is run as a “really tight” small business, he adds: “Every family has a maverick, renegade child, and that’s us.”

So, does Bauer have further ambitions to expand in the Irish market through acquisitions and would it be interested in RTÉ 2FM, were it for sale?

“We actively review all opportunities for acquisitions in Ireland that fit with our business model, but we don’t comment on speculation,” says Doyle.

The “big three” doesn’t have everything its own way in Irish radio, with several independently-owned local stations commanding their patches, notably Highland Radio in Donegal, Northern Sound in Cavan and Monaghan, MidWest Radio in Mayo and Radio Kerry, all of which have majority shares of listening.

In Dublin, the third biggest station behind Radio 1 and Newstalk is Sunshine 106.8, billed as “Dublin’s easy place to relax”. The music station pecking order is relatively new here: for years, Wireless’s FM104 was out in front, but the station’s market share – which nudged up to 7.3 per cent in the last JNLR – is now behind both that of Sunshine, which targets older listeners, and Spin 1038, aimed at younger ones.

“FM104 has a huge heritage, and it has had some audience challenges over the last number of years, we wouldn’t run away from that. But our goal is to get back to where we were,” says Scott Williams, group content director at Wireless Ireland, which has been owned by News Corp since 2016. A new show announcement is coming soon.

The Cork market, where Wireless owns 96FM and C103, is “just as competitive as Dublin”, he says. But notwithstanding Red FM’s recent poaching of 96FM breakfast host Keith Cunningham, better known as KC, Wireless has found Bauer to be “very collegiate” when working with it on various industry bodies, describing it as “a company of impeccable pedigree”.

Across the industry, there is recognition that competitive skirmishes with each other are only a small element of the survival game. As mobile phones and smart speakers increase in popularity as routes to radio, stations know that not all entry points are created equal. The existential cut-and-thrust of the business is how to stay “top of mind” when their brand’s app is just one of many on a phone or listeners must reaffirm to a smart speaker what they want to hear each time.

“It’s not like you turn the thing on where you last left it. You have to say ‘play the 2FM breakfast show’. Every day is a brand new day,” says Healy.

“The kitchen radio is now a smart speaker and, yes, that is harder because it is not tuned in all of the time,” agrees Williams.

His was the first voice heard on Irish-licensed independent airwaves in 1989. He is now as optimistic as anyone, suggesting that radio can thrive in the space between linear listening and the “tyranny of choice” offered by platforms such as Spotify.

Given the glut of digital alternatives, streams of music won’t really cut it anymore, says Williams. The “best broadcasters”, those who have the knack for sounding like they are speaking to one person rather than many, are the key.

“In many respects, that has turned radio back to where it started.”

At Beat, which marked its 20th birthday this summer, it was a good week to hit the beach: the station has invested in an outside broadcast unit for promotional outdoor activities, with the converted Landrover Defender beginning its tour by pulling up on Duncannon Beach, Co Wexford.

“I’m aiming for it to be out and about as much as possible,” says Cummins of the “Beat Beast”. Social media platforms Instagram and especially TikTok, meanwhile, have proven a vital “shop window” for Beat.

“Radio continues to be resilient and to meet the challenges that have been thrown our way.”

Wireless – which also owns Q102, LMFM and Live 95, plus U105 in Belfast – has been delving into “podcastery”, while Healy says RTÉ's “interim” refresh of its radio app this summer will be followed in 2024 by a new product “with the functionality of BBC Sounds”.

Bauer, for its part, has made substantial investments in digital, including in the sort of podcast content that appeals to radio avoiders.

“The performance of podcasts at Bauer has been exceptional with the huge growth over recent years continuing in 2023,” says Doyle. “We have seen podcast reach and listens grow 30 per cent on last year.”

Various series from sport network Off the Ball are Bauer’s top podcast performers in Ireland, followed closely by the Pat Kenny Show and the Last Word with Matt Cooper, while its Go Loud digital team has had “huge success” developing podcasts independent of its main radio brands, says Doyle.

While Bauer is “in a battle for the attention of younger audiences” like all entertainment companies, some 70 per cent of 15- to 34-year-olds still listen to Irish radio daily, he notes.

Regulatory developments, however, will likely determine how well radio stations can maintain their “discoverability” in the future. Doyle says the findability of radio stations in cars is “increasingly at risk from unfair preferencing by connected car user interfaces” and should be regulated, while if Big Tech is not subject to regulation on how it controls access via smart speakers and their voice assistants, this could prove “a significant threat”.

It has been a landmark week on that score, with the European Commission designating six companies – Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, TikTok owner ByteDance and Microsoft – as “gatekeepers” under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), and Doyle says Bauer is “watching the progress of the DMA closely”.

These off-air tugs-of-war are expected to have several reprises, not all of which may be favourable, but for now the mood remains almost as upbeat as the on-air banter. Cunningham mentions new “share of ear” research that shows live broadcast radio accounts for 74 per cent of all audio listening in Ireland, even if this does not always involve a device anyone would recognise as a radio.

This far outweighs a share of 12 per cent for music streamers including Spotify and Apple, 7 per cent for YouTube Music and 4 per cent for podcasts, “which people are always shocked about, they think it should be higher”.

Listening to music you own now represents a mere 2 per cent of audio listening, with the big streamers replacing that category, rather than radio, says Cunningham, who has been underwhelmed by Spotify’s live radio experiments to date.

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, the evolution of radio may depend on its often underestimated old-school skill: being a “friend” for listeners and every now and again, as Whelan might put it, delivering a great old “kick in the feels”.