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‘Whole new world’ for Radio 1 but can Oliver Callan help RTÉ reach whole new audience?

‘Establishment radio station’ enjoys solid market share of 20%, but still needs an influx of younger listeners

The task facing Oliver Callan is to attract new listeners at 9am without sheding the slot's existing audience. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

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Laura Slattery
Tue Jan 23 2024 - 06:15

Never mind disconcertingly fresh-faced gardaí: it’s when the line-up on RTÉ Radio 1 is suddenly younger than you that it’s time to take up heavy drinking.

Oliver Callan’s name finally going “over the door” of the station’s weekday 9am slot means there is now at least a hat-trick of weekday peak-time presenters on Radio 1 with birth dates later than mine, which is frankly unacceptable. I will be making a complaint to Coimisiún na Meán as soon as I can find the energy.

Otherwise, the appointment of Callan (43) to the hour-long slot — held by Ryan Tubridy from 2015 until RTÉ's undisclosed payments scandal last summer — is disappointingly devoid of controversy.

Even when he was a 19-year-old newsreader on local radio news provider International Network News, he sounded older than his age

Callan, as might be expected of a satirist with repeat commissions, is a smart and funny presenter who, like Tubridy before him, favours a vocal delivery that would be recognisable to the Radio 1 predecessors with which they grew up.

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Even when he was a 19-year-old newsreader on local radio news provider International Network News, he sounded older than his age. Callan told Brendan O’Connor on his Saturday show in an interview announcing his new two-year contract at what O’Connor accurately, if mischievously, described as an “establishment radio station”.

Callan, who begins his new show next Monday after a week of pre-production with a “reshuffled” team, said he hoped his appointment was “not too much of a shock for people”. Indeed, the choice can hardly be any surprise at all to Radio 1 listeners, who knew him as Tubridy’s stand-in long before the crisis of 2023.

The Saturday chat with his Radio 1 colleague was also notable for Callan’s pragmatic disclosure of his salary. He will be paid €150,000, he said, appearing to suggest this was the new benchmark for key presenters at RTÉ. The figure does not place him in the top 10 highest-paid on-air personnel list, he added, but it possibly will do soon given it’s a “whole new world” at Montrose and a raft of contracts are due to be renegotiated.

Listeners hearing how a pay package of €150,000 could be secured without negotiation, as Callan indicated it was, would be forgiven for thinking that they’re in the wrong game. But broadcasting is a hierarchical business, with a tradition of rewarding people who bosses think will help them chase marginal audience gains, and this is — at present — the second-biggest slot on Irish radio.

Some 17,000km away, Australian breakfast radio double-act Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson were already coining it before their latest 10-year deal to stay on the Aussie airwaves

For sure, the sum seems almost modest compared to some of the huge wads available to media personalities internationally. Podcast signings have taken up much of the oxygen over the past few years, but the most eyebrow-raising recent example of a truly massive pay day has come from the world of FM radio.

Some 17,000km away, Australian breakfast radio double-act Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson were already coining it before their latest 10-year deal to stay on the Aussie airwaves. Their new contract with KIIS FM, agreed last November, puts RTÉ's highest-paid in the ha’penny place.

Sandilands — a regulation-flouting “shock jock” figure — and Henderson signed an AU$200 million (€120 million) 10-year deal covering Sydney and Melbourne, meaning they will each be on track to pocket €6 million a year for the next decade. “Staggering,” the Sydney Morning Herald called the pay packet. Judging by audience size alone, it appears that way. Last year, the pair’s show — then Sydney-only — enjoyed only slightly more than double the listenership of 347,000 commanded by Radio 1′s 9am slot.

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Of course, there are limitations to the logic of comparing markets, while it makes even less sense to measure the size of the cheques waved about by a company like KIIS FM owner ARN Media against the ones available at a broadcaster like RTÉ.

ARN Media, listed on the Australian stock market, is a wholly commercial beast that made a pretax profit of AU$66 million (€40 million) in 2022. RTÉ is a public service broadcaster in cost-cutting mode that recorded a deficit of €2.8 million the same year. When it was flush, it paid Pat Kenny €900,000 for both the Late Late Show and his Radio 1 programme, but it was never in the KIIS league.

Still, there is one metric by which RTÉ Radio 1 remains in an enviable position: market share. Radio 1′s share of peak-time weekday listening ebbs and flows from quarter to quarter but is rarely too far from 20 per cent. In the most recent Joint National Listenership Research (JLNR) survey, it stood at 20.4 per cent, thanks in large part to older listeners who tune in reflexively for long stretches.

The next biggest station, Today FM, is on 9.7 per cent, while Newstalk has 7.6 per cent. Both stations, owned by Bauer Media Audio, have performed well lately, but in the most recent JNLR this was at the expense of local and regional stations, not RTÉ.

This brings us back to the question of age. My alarm aside, it is not the age of Radio 1′s presenters that matters, but the age of its audience

Although television is RTÉ's biggest commercial-income generator, Radio 1 brings in almost €15 million in annual revenue. This 2022 figure is down on the €17 million recorded a decade earlier, but that is not much of a decline in the grand scheme: Radio 1 is the solid, reliable workhorse that contributes positively to the reputation of RTÉ. It can claim a place on the shrinking list of things RTÉ doesn’t really have to worry about — for now.

This brings us back to the question of age. My alarm aside, it is not the age of Radio 1′s presenters that matters, but the age of its audience. This is the perennial challenge faced by all established and “establishment” media brands: if RTÉ can’t recruit younger listeners and lock in their loyalty, the station’s market share will only go in the wrong direction.

So, for a generation of hires led by Callan, Louise Duffy and Sarah McInerney, the task at hand is to speak to Radio 1′s existing audience — in effect, not frightening them off — while acting as the bridge to listeners the station hasn’t yet reached. No pressure, then. Anyone for a new jingle?

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