Not only has it cut more than 200 roles in the past six months, and off-shored three divisions, top on-air talent have been cut for financial reasons, and shares are down 36 per cent since January 1.
Now they are faced with further decisions, such as the future of breakfast on sister station Gold FM in Sydney. ARN is readying Melbourne’s The Christian O’Connell Show to go north in 2026 and high-rating Sydney duo Jonesy & Amanda are the expected casualty.
Sydney radio royalty, Gold FM’s Amanda Keller and Brendan Jones, aka Jonesy & Amanda.Credit: Getty Images
The national rollout of Kyle & Jackie O is also expected to continue into Brisbane in 2026, in the pair’s native Queensland where its top sales execs will hope for a better result than its eighth-place spot in Melbourne. However, they will be without talent booker Kirsten Ploog, who was recently made redundant.
Last month, KIIS axed The Zach & Dom Show, which had run nationally from 8pm to 10pm, reducing KIIS to just five live shows per day.
In November it axed up-and-coming presenter Mitch Churi from The Pick Up Show, which airs nationally in the afternoon. Jack Post, co-host on The Christian O’Connell Show, then left last month after contract negotiations fell through, two sources with knowledge of the discussions, speaking on condition of anonymity, said.
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Radio executives say Post, best known for his role alongside radio royalty Hamish & Andy, was crucial to the show’s success over the past seven years, and could be costly as it tries to break into Sydney.
He has since been replaced by Alex Cullen, who was sacked by Nine in January after a promo segment for billionaire Adrian Portelli went wrong. Post was approached for comment.
Now, with Jonesy & Amanda still in contract negotiations, there is a strong belief they will remain with Gold, but in the Drive slot to accommodate O’Connell’s arrival. The pair is reportedly asking for an improved contract deal after Sandilands and Henderson’s $20 million per year had raised expectations for radio talent’s asking prices.
An ARN spokesman confirmed it was in negotiations with Jonesy & Amanda, but he declined to comment further.
After plastering the city with billboards telling Melburnians they were now “behaving”, a new marketing campaign now sells Sandilands and Henderson’s show as “Radio Gone Rogue”, seemingly a return to their roots as a controversial and unpredictable pairing.
There were initial signs of improvement in Melbourne earlier this year after the pair appeared to have cleaned up the content on the show, but it may have begun to affect their native audience in Sydney, where numbers are on the slide.
Christian O’Connell, who anchors Gold’s breakfast show, is highly popular with the Melbourne audience he has won over across the past seven years.Credit: Joe Armao
Before long, Sandilands was proudly telling listeners he didn’t listen to management, and the day before the second ratings survey results would arrive in April, he let rip on the directive to clean the show up, insisting he and Henderson would quit Melbourne if they didn’t get their desired audience.
“We’re not just going to suck Melbourne off all day, every day,” Sandilands said. The next day, the show’s share would rise 0.7 percentage points (though his comments did not fall under this survey period). On the face of it, the rise was good news. But the show’s “cume”, meaning the total number of people having tuned into the show in the period, fell by 4000.
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When survey three’s results came this month, which took in the period of Sandilands’ outburst, the pair ceded the 0.7 percentage points from the second survey, dropping back to 5.1 per cent (eighth in the breakfast slot) and they lost a further 30,000 listeners.
ARN chief executive Ciaran Davis called the past 12 months an “unmitigated disaster” during a live Q+A with Sandilands and Henderson last week, according to several media reports.
Sandilands blamed the company for the show’s underwhelming launch, and said they should have launched nationally at once and spent more on marketing. He again said the audience would come around in Melbourne.
Breakfast is the most essential slot of the day for commercial radio, setting it up for a flow-on of the day’s listening. Changing or tinkering with a station’s breakfast show can be like performing open-heart surgery on a network, as one senior radio executive recently described it, speaking on background.
While there are still 9½ years to run on their deal, the first step has so far been nothing but disastrous. Since axing its former breakfast hosts in Melbourne, Jase & Lauren, KIIS has lost a third of its audience, equal to 209,000 listeners. During that time in Sydney, KIIS lost more than 20 per cent of its audience, or 188,000 listeners.
To make matters worse, Jase & Lauren, who sat on 9.1 per cent share when they left KIIS, were picked up by Nova, whose breakfast share at the time was 5 per cent, with a cumulative audience of 480,000.
Jase & Lauren are now the No.1 FM show in Melbourne, doubling Nova’s share to 10.2 per cent, with an audience of 741,000 listeners, sending advertisers flocking in their direction.
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