How Triple J’s Requestival Accidentally Revealed Our Changing Music Attitudes
Seeing Björk and Madonna bump up against Alex Lahey and Luca Brasi might look odd to some, but it's an accurate reflection of how most of us listen to music.
If you’d tuned into triple j on Tuesday morning last week, you would have been treated to an eyebrow-raising selection of music.
In the space of two hours, Scatman John’s ‘Scatman‘, Ludwig van Beethoven’s dramatic ‘Symphony No. 5 in C minor: I. Allegro con brio’, and Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’ would have blasted out the speakers from the youth broadcaster. Not your typical morning on the j’s.
It wasn’t any less chaotic in between these three points on the spectrum: Britney Spears, Sandi Thom, and Rupaul had all appeared before the midday bell had struck, as well as classics from Daft Punk, Todd Terje, and Earth, Wind & Fire. As well as, of course, a stack of music from local and emerging acts. It wasn’t so much a mixed bag as it was 15 different bags stuffed into one exploding suitcase.
This was triple j’s Requestival, a week-long ‘festival’ in which listeners completely took over the station from 6am to 9pm. Every song would be chosen by listeners, nothing was off the table. And nothing was: Madonna brushed up against the Dune Rats, John Cena’s ‘Entrance Theme’ was played, indie pop hero Carly Rae Jepsen found herself in amongst the cool kids at the j’s, quickly joined by pals like Ariana Grande and Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.
It was, in the eyes of many, a bit of fun — a bit of a thrill to see the formerly pop-hating station blast out ‘Run Away With Me’, or John Williams’ beloved Star Wars composition ‘Duel Of The Fates’.
And it was, but it also revealed that our tastes are no longer shackled by the bounds of genre or prestige, and that listening to Madonna just before the Dune Rats isn’t really novel at all — it’s now the way we listen to music. By allowing listeners to take over, triple j inadvertently created the perfect people’s station.
Finding Order In The Chaos
Requestival was the brainchild of triple j’s content director Ollie Wards, who was inspired by a similar event held in the Netherlands. It was planned long before the COVID-19 pandemic, although it seems to have landed at the perfect time to give listeners a morale boost.
“We wanted to give everything a community feel, bring everybody together with music,” Wards told Music Junkee last week.
“If there ever was a rulebook, it’s out the window. It feels like a real time for just a bit of fun, which is what this thing is about.”
“We wanted to do it when we were through the worst of everything. The whole world is doing crazy stuff — our state borders are closed, nobody knows what’s going on. If there ever was a rulebook, it’s out the window. It feels like a real time for just a bit of fun, which is what this thing is about.”
To say it was a success is to make a gross understatement. Last Thursday, the station announced it had received over 73,000 requests in just over a week, and they were still coming thick and fast.
“It is ridiculous, in a word. It is a big hot mess,” Wards said. “It’s a lot of fun but it feels….it’s kind of a Hottest 100 vibe going here. We’re really driving the limits for what a single Sharepoint spreadsheet can do here.”
At this stage, there’s simply too much data that needs to be sorted through before any major trends and patterns can be discerned — but Wards is hopeful they’ll be able to crunch some numbers soon.
“Compared to the Hottest 100, where we’re looking at one single year’s worth of music, there’s just a wild range,” Wards said, scrolling through the spreadsheet on the other end of the phone.
The main trend, Wards says, is that it’s so difficult to find one — but there seemed to be a push towards upbeat and positive music, no doubt in reaction to global events.
“A lot of the music makes you feel good – and that’s the power of music, so that’s an interesting trend to draw out of it,” he says. “Very anecdotally, a lot of this is stuff that makes you want to get up and dance.”
Streaming Killed Influenced The Radio Star
Seeing Björk and Earth, Wind & Fire bump up against Alex Lahey and Luca Brasi might look odd to some, but it’s an accurate reflection of how most of us listen to music.
Strict boundaries between genre and perceived “high” and “low” classes of music have completely crumbled in the last 15 years — beginning in earnest with the embrace of personal, digital music devices in the mid-2000s, right through to the current dominance of global streaming platforms.
The growing power of streaming playlists in the music industry is important too: Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist boasts just under 320,000 followers in Australia and New Zealand alone. The top workout playlist has over 660,000 followers, Morning Motivation has over 780,000, while playlists like Housework Hits, Aussie BBQ, and Dinner Mood have tens and tens of thousands.
These playlists don’t adhere to a particular genre — they run the gamut from pop to hip-hop to country to folk to rock to classical; it wouldn’t be unusual to hear Fleetwood Mac or Crosby, Stills & Nash right next to Kota Banks or Hockey Dad.
This request week is proving triple j doesn’t need a music director, just give the punters total control. https://t.co/F3hbGV53M9
— Osman Faruqi (@oz_f) May 26, 2020
Of course, triple j isn’t a streaming platform. It’s a radio station, and it has a markedly different mission to Spotify or Apple Music. It places a much greater emphasis on music discovery and nurturing careers than it does on daily, around-the-house listening.
“You’ve got the access to the entire back catalogue of the world in your pocket,” Wards says, when asked whether the choices in Requestival were reflective of our changing listening habits. “Monday morning we played Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’. And to see a lot of people requesting a song like that shows that there is a sense of looking back at music history and looking back at songs that people might’ve heard their parents play when they grew up.”
Changing Tastes, And The Myth Of The Guilty Pleasure
There was a consistent joke across social media during Requestival — that the music selected by triple j’s listeners was so wildly different from daily playlisting that the station must have lost touch with its audience.
If we’ve learned anything from Requestival it’s that Triple J listeners actually hate the music JJJ usually plays
— nina oyama (@ninaoyama) May 26, 2020
Of course, Nina Oyama’s tweet was a joke — although judging by the boomers in her mentions, it clearly went over some people’s heads. But there was a legitimate observation within these jokes: triple j’s listeners clearly have much broader taste than what is (and what can) be offered by the station on a daily basis.
“Part of the point of what we’re doing here is to recognise that,” Wards says to that point. “But some of the stuff that we’ve played I think…one spin of it and you can have a laugh at how you remember the lyrics to it, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily want to hear that every day. I’m thinking of some of the show tunes that we’ve played.
“I think within the setting of what we’re doing we’re totally going so broad that it will only make sense in this context. I come back to that example of Slayer and Beethoven, that’s kind of the breadth and range that we’re dealing with.”
As to what triple j play on a daily basis, Wards points out the station is already very broad in its scope.
“We play sixty percent Australian music, which I think is something people can let wash over them on a regular day,” he says. “So that comes with a broad range of stuff. We might not necessarily go from Beethoven to Slayer, but we definitely go from heavy rock to EDM to folk to pop…within any 15 minute period on triple j normally.
“We play 60 percent Australian music, which I think is something people can let wash over them on a regular day.”
“So while this week has blown all thoughts of expectations of the range of what we can play out the window, I think even when we are in our normal state, if we can call it that, we play a pretty impressive range anyway.”
It’s a salient point, and it’s also true that no radio station can possibly cater to the individual tastes of millions of listeners. Ward also points out that it’s been hard to tell which requests have just been “guilty pleasures” or people straight up trolling the station — the latter certainly took place.
“You can see people that have a guilty pleasure in there, bu the next thing they’ve got it a local independent Australian act, and the next thing is something from the ’60s. So lots of people flexing quite a broad taste,” he says.
As Velvet Winter argued for triple j last week, the “guilty pleasure” doesn’t exist anymore — in fact, it really hasn’t for years, its collapse caused, again, by streaming and playlists and people growing up.
When people are requesting Ariana Grande, they’re not doing for a thrill, they’re doing it because they want to listen to Ariana Grande.
And when people say “guilty pleasure”, they generally mean “pop music”, a genre triple j has historically eschewed. So when people are requesting Ariana Grande, they’re not doing for a thrill, they’re doing it because they want to listen to Ariana Grande.
Triple j’s attitude towards pop music has noticeably changed in recent years, thanks in large part to enthusiastic presenters like Bridget Hustwaite and, more recently, Lucy Smith.
The idea of pop music as a sugary treat devoid of nutrition when compared to that of white male dominated rock is not one that holds water. It never did. It’s taken a while, but triple j’s listeners now seem to agree.
Is Change On The Horizon?
As a way to take the temperature of their audience, Requestival is bound to have worked a treat; Wards says there will no doubt be a number of insights from the week that will be used by the station in years to come.
“The Hottest 100 is a good example of where we have such a massive amount of audience taste across the year, and we get all sorts of incredible data that we use throughout the year,” he explains.
“So once we’ve got some sort of program to crunch numbers from this campaign — the numbers are so big we weren’t expecting we haven’t been able to analyse it as we go, like we do in the Hottest 100 — I have no doubt we’ll have some insights about most requested acts, which song from a band is the most requested…that kind of thing. Out of those tens of thousands of requests, that’s quite good data to be looking at.”
“I’m not saying we’re gonna give ‘Crazy Frog’ the green light to ever get played again, but it’s interesting to see what the audience thing in this kind of context.”
As for whether Requestival will make a comeback, it seems to be on the cards — there’s even a petition going around to make it a permanent annual fixture.
“If we’re still alive by Monday of next week, we’ll probably look at it as a success,” Wards laughs.
Jules LeFevre is the editor of Music Junkee’s. Follow her on Twitter.