Radio with Scott Baker-Smith (Nova Entertainment)

We recently caught up with Scott Baker-Smith, Head of Music - Nova Network, over zoom for a chat about his illustrious career in radio spanning 25 years. Scott gives detail about the intricacies of his role, his mentors as well as providing a realistic perspective on the difficulties of work-life balance.

Pictured: Scott Baker-Smith

Introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do.

I'm Scott Baker-Smith, and my role is the head of music for the Nova network. Nova being an FM network that broadcasts radio stations in the five big metro markets in Australia. So I implement and execute the music strategy for Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth. That is working on having a knowledge of who our target audience is and then making sure that our playlist and our music reflects their passion point for music. So that's my job day in day out basically.

What influenced you to work in radio?

So this is my 25th year in radio, give or take a bit of time. I started when I was in school. I always had a passion for music and always had a passion for talking a lot but also had a passion for the mechanical side of how it gets put together – so the bits in between the songs, how they sound and what things that you say on the radio. That feeling of putting on headphones and talking in front of the microphone was always appealing to me. But I think the music side of it was probably the passion point for me. I’ve got a handful of guitars, but doesn't mean I can play them all, I can't play properly, and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to be a singer or a musician. So, I wanted to be in the industry and have an influence in some way. Radio was something I just sort of gravitated towards, like I said, I started when I was in school, and I just felt I had a really great natural ability to do it. I'm an effective communicator, and really passionate about music and passionate about audience and passionate about affecting a whole range of people at once. And you can do that just by playing a song or not playing a song. And you know, radio stations mean something to people. The other thing too is that for me, it was a really great way of building my confidence. I wasn't a very confident kid, I hated public speaking. I’ve found that radio's really effective of being a really great place and a really great industry to be in if you're an introverted extrovert. So, I could be behind the mic at the time when I first started and talk and say things and put a show together but can't walk into a room full of people. I just had that phobia of blushing, and whatever. So probably the music side of it and that communication side of it was the thing that that got me into radio.

Was there someone who mentored you whilst growing in the industry?

So, I wasn't great at school, and I was thinking about going to university and I've obviously done a bit of study since then, but I don't have a degree or anything like that. I knew that I needed to try and find something that I would be good at. That happened to be radio. I remember speaking to a cousin of my mum's who was retired, and he had a career in radio, as a station manager in regional New South Wales and Tasmania, and as a suggestion of my parents, they said, give him a call and see what he has to say. And I'm like, yeah cool. Okay. He said, Where are you? And I said, Well, I'm in regional New South Wales. And it just so happened that the radio station was on the same block as where I lived. It was a 15 second run. And he said, go to the radio station, and just volunteer yourself to observe to learn. And he said, you'll get more out of doing that, then you will going to do a radio course. And no disrespect to people who have done that, because I know lots of people have done that. But he said, that's real time learning that is where you gain the skills and knowledge. And within three weeks of volunteering my time I got paid work, and within a year I was on air on the radio, so he was really great mentor.

And my other mentor now, who had been my mentor for 20 years, is a mate of mine called Jamie. So, in the late 90s/early 2000s, I'd been at that local radio station for a couple years. And then I kind of got the itch of going, I need to get out on home now. I was 20 or 21. So, you’d send out demos; it was a tape back then of your talk breaks and the tape goes for like two to five minutes. And this guy called Jamie called me and he was working in Hobart and he goes, I don't have a job for you and I can't help you right now, but I just want to let you know you're gonna be okay. And you kind of go, why am I getting a call saying I'm gonna be okay? What does that mean? And then three years later, he calls me and he goes, so you've got another job. And I'm like, yeah, moved out to Gippsland and got to launch another FM radio station out in the country. And he goes, you’re going to get a call from my boss, Craig Bruce, and you're going to get interviewed for a job. Cool. So, got interviewed, got the job. But Jamie was the guy that, you know, three years passed and he helped me get a job. And then Jamie and I worked together in Adelaide, I was his 2IC; he was Head of Music at Austereo in Adelaide. Then we both got promoted, he became the music director of 2day FM I became the music director of Fox FM and we're still mates, even after all these years. He's part of the Commercial Radio Australia organisation now. I still turn to him for advice. He's a friend and a mentor. And the guy was always a couple steps ahead of me, so someone I can look up to.

My other mentor would have to be my boss right now, Paul Jackson. Paul is my mentor without him realising it and we've never explicitly spoken about the fact that he's my mentor but he has re-taught me radio over the last sort of six, seven years. Paul and I have known each other for a number of years. About 10 years ago, I resigned from Austereo and he was actually the first person outside of my immediate boss at the time, who spoke to me and said, Can you come and work for me? And you just go Wow, I'm so humbled by the fact that you know who I am. Paul asked me three times to do this job and I said, no, three times. He was very persistent and the fourth time, I said yes.

They're probably the two main guys Jaime and Paul. They're my current, long standing mentors, and I think you need them [mentors]. You need them for the rest of your life and they could be the same people, they could be different people, but you need that sounding board. The characteristics of those two guys is that they are high achieving professionals that have always been a couple of steps ahead of me in their careers, and are people that I look up to, but at the same time you can shoot the shit about stuff. They're also never afraid to give their opinion and never afraid to listen. They’re a couple of really great guys.

In your opinion, what makes Nova different to other stations?

Well, I think currently, it's pretty obvious because we're the only new music and hit music stations in town. When you talk about Nova 100, I mean, there's Kiis but we beat them yesterday in survey, so we'll take that thank you. And Fox is a variety station, fox is smoothfm-like at the moment. They're trying to be a sort of an amalgamation of Nova with current hits and smoothfm and Gold with variety. So, we're different to other stations because of our strategy, because of the way we put the music together. We can use data to back ourselves, but it's more of a feeling at times. You put a song on because you go, we really want this to work. One of those little tricks is the Jonas Brothers’ ‘Sucker’ which was a song that was not researching and had no passion point with our audience, but you go, if I give the song the rotation, exposure and spins it deserves, the audience will eventually follow you. And sure enough, they did.

The other thing about our radio station as well is that yes, let’s say for Nova 100, you do have these pillars of providers of content. Chrissy, Sam and Browny, Kate, Tim and Joel, Smallzy, and you need those to tie the brand together. But the difference between Nova and other radio stations is that we approach everything as a whole radio station. We're doing 50K Monday’s at the moment, which is a tactic where every week we give away $50,000 to one person that's on air, so you get on air on Monday and you're in the draw. But everyone's doing that. So Smallzy, Kate, Tim and Joel, Chrissie, Sam and Browny, Jamie and Mel, and we're doing it on weekends. So when you have an approach like that, it's an all in approach. I think people do talk about our breakfast show, people do talk about Smallzy people who talk about Drive Show, but at the end of the day, people also talk about Nova. I don't think they talk about Fox like that. You talk about Fifi and Byron. They don't talk about the station, they talk about the shows like Hamish and Andy, so that's the difference.

Like I said, going back to it, we're driving hits. You see that in the Shazam Chart. Look at that and Spotify and Apple Music. There is a direct correlation between us playing a song and a Shazam search of discovery for that song. Still, even after all these years, for me, one of the humbling, great parts of the job is when you see that reaction, which you never used to see. The fact that we have that it's so real, and so quick. I mean, the longevity of a song just is not what it used to be. I mean, a song can last four weeks now, whereas they used to last a lot longer. Other songs can stay on forever, you know, ‘Blinding Lights’, great example or ‘Don't Start Now’, songs that have been around since the start of the year or even last year. I think the other thing too is we're not is you listen to Nova 100, and it's not the bells and whistles and hype and in your face, it's quite subdued, make up your own mind. And we still put our best foot forward playing our listeners favourite songs. But, it's not all that superfluous stuff that a lot of other radio stations do, we just sort of drop that by the wayside and go, ‘it's Nova 100 here is Jason Derulo’. So, you know, that's what makes it different. And you don't need me saying that. It's the one thing that we say to everybody and I say to people, I say it to the record labels, I say it to listeners; listen to us, listen to Fox, listen to Gold, listen to Smooth, listen to Triple M, and the only way that you're going to understand exactly what we're about is by listening to us. And you need to listen to us for a period of time to get an idea.

What are the day to day tasks that you undertake as the Head of Music?

No two days are the same. It's multifaceted. You live inside a scheduling system. We use a scheduling system called G Selector, which is used worldwide. G Selector talks directly to Zetta, our playout system. Then, our sales force use Inquira. That's the traffic system with inventory, commercials and commercial breaks. And all those systems talk to each other, and then it gets through the playout system through there. G Selector is where all the song files are based. It has loads of detail, like what type of song it is, how fast or slow it is, male or female artist, what the style of the song is, and every song is in a category. The category then sits in the clock. The clock is the template determining which category goes where. So you can make sure you're not playing new songs next to each other. You spread your new songs out, you spread your hot currents out, you spread your gold songs out. And then you colour code all your types and tempos and all that. Then you have your high rotation songs and you can set the system up to auto schedule those. After that you fill all the gaps. You put your research scores in there as well and that data tells you if you have three or four low scoring songs that your listeners aren't passionate about, that doesn't work. When you schedule the hour, you want to make sure you don't play slow songs together, or fast songs together, or new songs together, or old songs together. It’s a typical top 40 radio station. This has been around for 60 years, 70 years; you play the hot currents, the songs in the last 10 years that they still love the play, the new song everyone's going to love. Then you go to your other song that is still pretty current and then to the song from the last couple of years. The other thing too is intricately knowing what your audiences’ habits are. We know from our eight radio surveys a year, that they do not listen for a long time. We have a format that has a lot of audience but very little listening time. So, it's my job to try and make sure that we’re not being too repetitive. That's the other thing too when you're putting the log together day to day, you don’t have the same songs playing in the same hours as the previous day. You move songs around in quarter hour as well. So I won't play Magic’s ‘Rude’ in the first 15 minutes of 9am, and the first 15 minutes of 1pm on a Thursday, you want to spread it all out.

Also working with record labels really closely, they're partners and are really important. I'm their client, they're my client. It's got to be said that major labels still provide us with the majority of our music. The biggest artists in the world are still signed to major labels. It's their job to provide publicity and promotion for those artists and that's what they do. They come to us every week with a whole list of priority songs they want us to play and we add two to three songs a week, if that.

There’s lots of meetings, talking to people and educating them about what we do, putting together some music, constantly working on the strategy, constantly looking at research, looking at insights, looking at trends, listening to new music, listening to old music, listening to other radio stations around the world. Alexa has been my really good friend over the last few months. And that's the role. It's so easy to answer it in a very short period of time, but it's a very involved laborious job that requires your passionate attention constantly. And you think about it and music's on in the car, music's on while we're talking, music is on when my kids are wanting to listen to Alexa, music's on the TV, I'm listening something online, you've always constantly got it running through your mind. Out of all the different parts of my career, this is the job that I've done the longest, being a music director. I started in the last century and am still going, so I must be doing something right.

What advice would you give to those aspiring to work in radio?

You’ve got to talk to people in radio, talk to people in the industry and work out what you want to do. I think people outside of radio who don't work in it don't understand how micro and macro it can be and how diverse the elements of the radio station are. We work on so much different stuff. I spend sweat, blood and tears putting together a music log that's just on the background, and do people care that much? I don't know. I hope they do. But, you know, an audio producer spends an infinite amount of time putting together some really great imaging and audio identification in between songs. A copywriter will spend an infinite amount of time writing an ad that's actually quite funny that just gets played in an ad break. But there's so much to radio that people just don't understand. And you know, there's some other really general sort of take out from it. Anyone can do it, only a few of us do it well. I know a lot of people do it really well and a lot of people have done it really badly. And the ones that have done badly don't get to stay around. You've got to have a passion for radio to begin with. If you don't spend your waking hours listening or thinking about radio, then don't bother. I think that if you see it as an in to get to something else, then just go straight to that. So many times people say to me "Yeah, I really love music, so I just want to do radio" and I sat explained to them what my job is. And they go, Oh, so you don't just sit around listening to music all day? It's more of an analyst role. It's a data science role. It can be subjective and it can be emotionally driven, that’s not the job. There is OCD in me as well, I like when the music log colour coded, so it looks a certain way, and it's all nice and neat and tidy, and everything looks the way it's supposed to. If you're a creative person and you want to do radio, there's definitely outlets within radio for that. And I'm not one of those people. I think I'm probably a little bit more process-oriented and meticulous in my approach to it. I get asked a lot, what's the advice, and I am never able to completely articulate it, but I think I've stumbled onto that thing; if you don't have a passion for the medium in its form that it is and where it can go, then you just can't bother with it, at all.

What are your thoughts and advice on work-life balance?

Ha. You've actually stumped me. I actually don't know what it is.

My thoughts on it work life balance is that it's really hard to achieve it. You've got to have an off switch and I've kind of found that radio people don't have work life balance. I met my wife through radio so it probably says a lot about the fact that I really wasn't going out all that much. My mentors are in radio. Some of my best mates are in radio and still are, but I think you really stumped me with it. I have become really good at compartmentalising and putting my work over there and putting my life over here. You've got to have those things that can draw your attention away from your work. It's easy for me cause I've got my kids so it's their sports activities and school and it's homework. It's finding a way to turn off.

If I go on holidays, I turn the mail off my phone, so I don't get emails for work. I'll set aside time in my mind and go, you know, today, I'm not looking at my phone to do this. That whole cliché of we're all also ultra-connected now that everything's kind of on your phone, on your watch, available.

I wish I could sort of walk away from that work life balance sort of inquiry and just kind of go yeah, no, this is the this is the silver bullet. This is the way you do it. The only thing I can think of is just having that switch off. Which I know a lot of people don't. I work with people that don't but I also have people who do and work with people who understand that I do. Which is a really big thing. And it's that constant planning in your head of going this is when I'm going to switch off. You know how when you've got a partner and you're like, okay, we're gonna book a date night, we're going to do this and this and this. It's doing that same sort of mentality and approach for yourself. I wish I had wiser words, but I do not. The only other advice that I have, which was given to me by someone close to me a long time ago. I've taken it on more as I've gotten older and the longer it's sat with me, and they said to me, just don't forget to breathe. Yeah. That helps your work life balance.