Music & Culture

Community radio stations focus on supporting and developing local and Australian arts, music and culture in their programming, reflecting and developing a sense of Australian identity, character as well as cultural diversity.

Community radio has long been acknowledged as a major contributor to the development of the Australian music industry. An average of 36% of all music played on community radio is Australian (CBD 2007).

“From the beginning, community radio has been the channel between us and an audience.” said Toby Martin, singer / songwriter of Youth Group. “If we had a new CD out or had a show coming up we would go in and talk about it. Whether 3 people were listening or 3,000 it didn’t really matter - what mattered was the feeling that what we did wasn’t done in a vacuum; that there were people out there who might be interested in what we were doing and that we could reach them.”

It's a sentiment that it echoed throughout the industry. Richard Davison, Director, Broadcast Licensing at APRA stated "The support that the community broadcasting sector provides to Australian songwriters and composers is invaluable. It is particularly encouraging to see community broadcasters - particularly indigenous, youth and rural stations - not just meeting, but exceeding their Australian music quotas. By exploring and supporting different genres of music, community broadcasters provide a strong platform for so many Australian songwriters and composers to have their music heard.”

On a weekly basis, stations broadcast an average of 44 hours of Australian music. Some categories of stations exceed this average; for example, Indigenous stations broadcast the most with 65 hours a week, and youth stations broadcast 55 hours. In all, a total of 12,547 hours of Australian music is played weekly on community radio stations, equal to 652,444 hours over a twelve month period (CBD 2007).