What's the deal with triple jUnearthed digital?

Thu 10th Nov, 2011 in Features

Before he moved to take on a new gig as Assistant Music Director of Australian Music at triple j, Dave Ruby Howe set just a few desks over from FasterLouder manning the Deputy Editor’s desk at our sister site inthemix. Now Dave is responsible for Unearthed Digital, the radio station devoted to new, independent and unsigned Australian music that launched last month.

You might know Dave (or Dr H as he’s known in the triple j hallways) from his work on inthemix and FasterLouder or from his rather excellent blog Hyperbole. You definitely know triple j Unearthed – it has helped to launch the careers of Stonefield, Boy and Bear, Art Vs Science, Gypsy and the Cat, The Jezabels, Washington, Little Red, Philadelphia Grand Jury, Oh Mercy, Grinspoon and just about every Australian band you’ve seen grace a festival stage.

With the station up and running, FL headed over to triple j HQ to ask Dave a whole lot of questions about how Unearthed Digital works.

So I guess we should start with the basics. What’s a day in the life for the Assistant Music Director of Australian Music at triple j? You come in; stick your headphones on and listen to 32 thousand unsigned bands?
I get in probably at nine or before nine. Every day I’ll have the radio that day scheduled ahead, and hopefully the day ahead of that as well. But I won’t go that much ahead because if something really new comes up and I want to put it in straightaway and have it ready for the next day.

So what I’ll do basically is I’ll put my headphones on, put the cans on, and they won’t leave my head for most of the day. I’ll listen to some of what’s in the cue for triple j Unearthed; I’ll probably do a little hunt, anyway. I might use the tag search, like what sounds like Skrillex. There are a few that do, I’ll tell you that!

How have you settled in at triple j? What has it been like working on the launch of Unearthed?
Nick [Findlay, Assistant Music Director] was there from the start, helping me before I even came on ploughing the field… Sowing the seeds… I don’t know any other agricultural metaphors. So that was really good, I had a real sort of base to start with. Since then, it’s been going and going and going and going. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week of music. It’s a lot to ingest and I was pretty overwhelmed to begin with. But it’s been really great. I think, for the most part, the reactions have been the best part of it. Everybody seems to really, really like it.

How are you getting those reactions? There’s no presenter to call in and chat to; so how do you find out what the engagement is?
I think there are quarterly ratings, and they’re not going to come out just yet. So I’m not too worried about that for the moment. I think it’s just the little reactions, just like when I tell a band that they’re getting played, that we’ve added them to the station, then they’re really stoked. Or just people emailing in, saying, ‘What’s the frequency!” And we tell them, listen online or if you have a digital radio, listen there. And then the audience has been really great, saying, “This is better than real triple j,” “I can switch over at 5:30 so I don’t have to listen to Hack anymore,” something like that. “No Kanye”, that was one comment.

“No Kanye; no Skrillex?”
Yeah, exactly. Just people interacting on Twitter and Facebook seem to really be digging it. The first day, when we did the simulcast, it was really cool to hear all Australian music on both triple j and triple j Unearthed, and people were really into it. I think that was a good way to ease people into the idea and let them know that there’s a shitload of really good Australian music out there that they may not have heard. I mean, I wasn’t sure how much, really, there was going to be when I got the job.

That was one thing I was wondering. Do we really have enough for a 24 hour, 7 days a week radio station, or is there a risk that it will become “Demo FM”?
There’s a quality control in place where there’s got to be a level of production, or at least recording quality, so you don’t hear that many really rough demos on there now. I think the way people record and have access to technology now; it’s bumped everything up and now is the perfect time to do it.

You couldn’t have done it when Unearthed started back in the 90s.
No, it would have been pretty horrible. The reaction’s been really good. I think for the most part, people who listen to it really like it, and if they don’t listen to it, then they don’t really get it. I think once people give it a go, they can really hear some cool stuff on there.

Do you have an idea of who’s listening to it? What’s the target audience for a radio station that plays bands that no that one knows without presenters? Are you just expecting the A&R folk to be tuning in?
Well, I know that the A&R community is very excited about it, and a lot of other bands and industry people. But I think to get sort of, marketing speak or technical and go drill down the demographics, I think 18-24. Those early adopters who actively find new music. They’re on Hypemachine, they’re on blogs, they’re on FL or Mess+Noise and they’re seeing new artists and new talent. They’re not waiting for someone to tell them about it. They’re finding it themselves.

I think that’s one of the ways that I used to use Unearthed when I was blogging. I would just do a random search and hopefully find something good and post it on my blog. I guess it’s people like that who really care and really want to find stuff in their own backyard that they can find on triple j Unearthed and then maybe see them out playing at World Bar on Saturday night or something like that. Just a young band who’ve got two songs, and are just really starting out.

People really want to discover and be there on the ground level basically. I’ve always been that kind of person. Not satisfied with waiting for albums from bands with five albums, I just really want to find really raw, new, fresh talent. I think that’s the sort of people who listen to triple j Unearthed.

Are you finding it’s like coming back into real triple j? Are these Unearthed radio songs getting requested on Super Request? Is that part of the aim?
I don’t know if there’s a direct game plan on that level, but I know that all the triple j, the real triple j… The main triple j, big daddy triple j, the big brother, I don’t know. “triple j proper”… All the presenters like Dom [Alessio] and Dan [Buhagiar, Senior Music Producer ] and Lewi [McKirdy], they’re all always on Unearthed and they’re always looking for new music. So we might find a band and tell them because we’re really excited about it, and they’ll go and review it and if they like it, they’ll play it on their show. Same with Richard [Kingsmill] in the library every week.

It’s like, they’re not divided by any sense. We do work autonomously, but it feeds into each other really nicely. I think a good success story since we started is The Rubens, which I know you guys featured in the Playlist recently. They’re just amazing. I just stumbled upon them on Unearthed and I saw that Dan Buhagiar, who’s the senior music producer for triple j, she had reviewed them. So I checked them out and I loved their songs immediately, so I put them into high rotation on triple j Unearthed.

The Rubens – Lay It Down

What’s high rotation on Unearthed? How many plays is that?
That’s four plays a day. There are six songs that get high rotation, and that change. The high rotation category changes all the time. So I sent The Rubens onto Zan and Lewi, and they both loved the track as well. They reviewed it; they started playing it in their shows. It was an instant sort of reaction, where the audience… It was a track that really clicked with them. They started requesting it. Other presenters started playing it on triple j and I went and saw them on Friday night, and they had like 150 people singing along to that song. Which is really, really crazy, and they’re just stoked about it. So I think that’s a good example of how it works. It’s pretty open.