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Inside Sydney community station FBi Radio’s Redfern headquarters, there is a room full of shelves packed with CDs, and the walls are covered in posters of bands, gigs and former FBi crew. The receptionist is rocking a voluminous mullet and patchwork tattoos, taking calls on a landline.
In booths, equally edgy-looking presenters are talking on air or preparing to interview musicians to satisfy the station’s aim of playing 50 per cent Australian music, half of that from Sydney.
Although the airwaves dominated by mainstream FM music and AM talkback stations, Sydney community radio stations such as FBi and SURG FM are achieving something any station would envy – attracting loyal young listeners.
“What we do here at FBi is something that no other community radio station does, and that is that we tailor our content specifically to the youth audiences, and we make sure that certain percentages of our music come from local areas,” FBi’s music and programming director Tommy Boutros, says.
“We have our finger on the pulse,” FBi’s office and volunteer manager Jasmine Telfer adds. She and Boutros are two of five paid employees at FBi, while about 300 people volunteer at the station. “Pretend it’s like a race – we’ve always had that head-start … when we look back on artists, or even the city library, you pick up a CD, like, ‘Oh my god, they’re huge now, and they started here’.”
The list of names that were first played on FBi airwaves includes Flume, Genesis Owusu, The Kid Laroi, Courtney Barnett, Sampa The Great, Julia Jacklin and The Presets.
An FBi audience report examining the second half of the 2024 calendar year revealed the station experienced 14.3 per cent growth in weekly listeners, going from 140,000 to 160,000 in six months. (Commercial radio stations have ratings compiled by media measurement company GfK over eight surveys a year, while community radio has to gather its own.)
More than a third of that growth came from young people aged 15 to 24, while the number of overall first-time listeners to the station increased by more than 11 per cent.
Youth audience growth at FBi isn’t an anomaly – young people already make up a large slice of community radio listeners. Experts say it’s a move towards embracing the careful curation of tastemakers while rejecting repetitive AI and algorithms.
According to 2023 data from the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia released in a May report, young people aged between 15 and 39 comprise 46 per cent of community radio listeners. Listeners aged 15 to 24 were also the most likely to discover an Australian artist from community radio.
CBAA’s music director Andrew Khedoori says community radio has always been popular as a local connector, but the report suggests listeners have now begun tuning to it to discover new music. “Streaming has been this infinite library and [was] really attractive to people for a long time, but I just think that there’s this little turning of the tide at the moment,” he says.
“We’re really far down the line in the digital era, and now we’re just in this sort of phase of pollution … people want to feel a little bit more grounded; they want to have a more authentic experience and connection with culture.”
Over at the University of Sydney, Lucy Horton leads the photographer and I down three flights of stairs beneath Holme Building to where SURG FM operates. We enter a small, windowless room tinted in lavender lighting where Calista Burrowes is wrangling a Spotify playlist while the station is on university break.
“We have a lot of Sydney-based artists on our playlist – a lot of local, smaller groups, bands, solo acts. I’ve got Smusko, Lily B on here, but we also have a mixture of older, global music as well because we know people tend to enjoy that; we have a lot of, I guess, old heads at the studio,” Burrowes says.
To keep the station popular for those who don’t tune in live, Horton says SURG has begun hosting more live performances and is re-uploading mixes on SoundCloud. Burrowes adds: “That’s how we seem to cultivate our audience. We can’t know for sure how many people at a time are listening, but we try and do our best to market ourselves to ensure that we do have a supporter base.”
It’s part of the reason Beat Kitchen Records’ Fernando Benavides has decided to launch his own community digital station, Centre Point Radio. Starting in October, Benavides’ station will be a monthly radio show running across multiple days, inviting local artists to perform in a space in Parramatta.
“We’re making it a non-profit; none of us is really making money here. It’s volunteering, but I’ve also had a lot of people, friends, homies, who are down to get a part of it because they also recognise the value of community radio – even though it’s not for making money, it creates so much culture,” he says.
The reason young people are moving to community radio is that they desire community and a reason to slow down, Benavides says.
“Connection in a time of social media exhaustion is super important because if it’s radio, if it’s live music, if it’s making a T-shirt, if it’s whatever, it’s connection at the end of the day … that’s why platforms like Nothing On In Sydney work so well – people are looking for that,” he says.
