Two strong hearts: SCA baits ARN with new Heart Network
Heart is SCA's new digital audio network. Sound familiar?
This morning, Southern Cross Austereo announced the Heart Network, a new national band of music stations streaming across DAB+ and Listnr. Tomorrow, rival network ARN will announce a major refresh of its iHeart app. Is that the sound of lawyers circling?
SCA’s Heart Network will start with two adult contemporary stations — Heart and Heart Hits — before following what it calls “a clear roadmap for further expansion across genres and formats” in a media release issued on Tuesday morning.
The Heart station is “crafted for a female audience, offering a mood based format that helps listeners to escape and unwind with a diverse range of songs spanning the 70s, 80s to now” — with the ‘now’ portion compressing four decades into a narrow funnel featuring the likes of Ronan Keating and Ed Sheeran. Heart Hits, meanwhile, “caters for a nostalgia driven audience” with the likes of Madonna, Queen, and U2 on high rotation.
This was only registered Thursday of last week. Game playing.
I get the push to music genre formats to particular demographics. That makes sense to me. I’ve often wondered why that hasn’t seemed to have happened earlier and on more stations. What exercises my mind is why other specific demographics haven’t been identified to aim ”genre music” at, e.g. blues/rock covering the late 60s, 70s, 80s and 90’s as just one, probably to 25+ males, in which there is a shedload of great artists and bands (measured by their following) who seem to receive very sparse airplay across all current stations.
In the final analysis, I guess it’s still a numbers game, and average, cumulative audience size, share and cost efficiency still rules in the big media buyer’s world.
These remarks probably say most things about the reason I’m not and never was a content director and everything else about why I was a media buyer.
The 1990’s UK Heart stations sounded very much like Smooth does today. Maybe all three big radio groups can engage lawyers before this is resolved?