If young people have moved on from radio, can the youth broadcaster still make an impact?

“We’re playing venues bands that get played on Triple J could only dream of,” Alex Cameron told the sold-out Bridge Hotel crowd in Castlemaine.

The Sydney born indie musician is seemingly right in the station’s wheelhouse, an offbeat artist with lyrics too controversial for commercial radio.

But Triple J has almost completely ignored him.

The internet, however, has embraced Cameron – his work has been praised by popular music critic Anthony Fantano and he’s a favourite on music discussion sites.

He’s been able to turn this into a successful career, with over 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, frequent collaborations with The Killers and a popular meme based on one of his songs.

It’s far from the only time a local indie-artist has made it big without Triple J support.  

While the station has a long history of highlighting exciting new acts, a  broader shift away from radio has some questioning its relevance the current climate.

FM radio is still the most popular audio medium in Australia, but more and more young people are choosing streaming over traditional radio.

Triple J aims its programming at the youth market – but how can they reach this market if young people aren’t listening to radio?

To the station’s credit, it’s tried to adapt to the streaming era having long been an early adopter of new technologies and allowing users to live-stream content and vote for songs online as early as 1997.

Today, there are many ways to interact with Triple J beyond traditional radio.

Fans can listen to some shows as podcasts, tune in live with the station’s app  and view clips and other content on social media.

While the medium may change, the goal has stayed the same – most of the station’s social media content still aims to highlight Aussie musicians.

One of the most successful examples of this is ‘Like a Version’, a long-running, weekly segment where artists cover some of their favourite songs. Videos of these performances are uploaded online, with the most popular getting millions of views.

In January, Australian pop-duo Royel Otis covered Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ for the segment.

Their performance went viral, with millions of views across YouTube and TikTok.

It lead to an uptick in Google search interest for the band and the band’s debut album opened at #10 on the ARIA charts when it released a month later.

They were joined in the charts that week by Middle Kids, another band boosted by Triple J support.

While both bands show the impact the station can have on an artist’s career, the rest of that week’s chart was exclusively international artists, reflecting the bleak state of the Australian music industry.

As audiences shift to streaming, local artists are being forced to compete on a global scale.

Mainstream radio stations are bound to local content quotas, requiring at least 25% of music played to be Australian; Triple J goes above and beyond this, with Aussie artists making up 64% of its most played tracks last year.

Streaming services are not bound by these quotas – and sociology and music professor Michael Walsh says this makes it much harder for Australian artists to build an audience.

“If we want to have live music in Australia, there needs to be some kind of supportive mechanism for that, and it needs to be through not only radio, but streaming services as well,” he said.

Dr Sam Whiting – a lecturer specialising in the music industry – has also joined calls for a local content quota for streaming services.

“Without a mandate on those platforms to promote, and playlists, local content, Australian artists are going to suffer…[on streaming services] they don’t have that structural support that public or community radio can offer to local musicians, because these are giant, multinational platforms that don’t care about developing Australian artists,” he said.

While radio playlists are curated by expert DJs, streaming services rely on algorithms to predict what songs users will enjoy.

Dr Whiting says these two approaches have radically different outcomes.

“You’re much less likely to hear something completely removed from what you’ve already listened to, which means we’re kind of getting more niche and more targeted in our tastes,” he said.

“Spotify doesn’t seem to have room in its algorithm for accounting that like huge complexity in the way that a human programmer might have.”

This can have positive effects, as it lets artists more easily find an audience.

Perth-based musician ‘Kaikobad’ produces ambient-electronic music.

Though he has been played on Triple J before he says this had little impact on his overall popularity.

“A one-off or twice-off play on Triple J is just not really doing anything for you,” he said.

Instead, he was able to leverage the algorithm to connect with an audience.

In October last year, the artist posted some TikTok videos featuring his song ‘Corrections’.

The videos went viral, which drew more listeners to the song on Spotify.

“Spotify picked up on it, because a lot of people were searching for it, and they chucked it on one of their playlists,” he said.

The song was placed on Spotify’s curated ‘Ethereal’ playlist, which has more than 1.5 million likes, and currently his most popular on the platform with more than 100,000 streams.

Because both TikTok and Spotify use similar recommendation algorithms, Kaikobad’s music was served to people who already listened to comparable music (and so were likely to enjoy his work).

Despite working in a relatively niche genre, it meant he had a direct line to his target audience.

But this comes with a trade-off.

“Someone listening to Triple J 20 years ago…they would be exposed to so much music, there would be pop, rock, rap, everything right?” he said.

“Now people don’t need to do that, they can just listen to rap, and then get into five different rap sub-genres.”

The past year has seen major music festivals cancelled, and while some are quick to blame the cost of living, Dr Whiting believes a broader cultural shift is the real culprit.

“That these festivals can’t attract audiences anymore says a lot to me about the fact that the way we access music is affecting the choices we make about live music consumption,” he said.

While multi-genre festivals are struggling, more focused events like Byron Bay Bluesfest and Knotfest are succeeding.

Streaming services are pushing users into niche-genre-bubbles, and these music festivals are much better positioned to adapt to changing listening habits.

It wouldn’t be fair to blame all of Triple J’s woes on a dying medium – plenty of people are still listening to radio, but they’re just tuning in to other stations.

It seems Triple J – the station that once branded itself as fresh and exciting – may have grown stagnant.

Richard Kingsmill was Triple J’s music director since 2003, deciding what songs and artists would go on air.

When he was ousted last December, most of the coverage hailed him as the ‘king’ of Australian music.

But Dr Whiting believes he was kept around for too long.

“Kingsmill has this idea of what the ideal Australian band sounds like….when you let that seep into the broader culture of a broadcaster, where everyone’s thinking ‘would Kingsmill like this band’, then it just homogenises the whole thing,” he said.

It’s too early to tell what the post-Kingsmill era of Triple J will bring.

Without him calling the shots, hosts might have more freedom with the music they play, leading to a greater diversity in sounds.

Axing Kingsmill was one of Ben Lattimers first moves as the ABC’s new head of radio.

The former NOVA executive says big changes need to be made to increase ratings across the network.

When Triple J launched nearly 50 years ago, it set itself apart by playing music the commercial networks wouldn’t – and now, it appears it’s playing catch-up.