ARN's CEO says the new KIIS breakfast show will be ‘live and free’. Here's why he shouldn't

ARN Media has a hard job ahead of it. It needs to launch new breakfast shows in Sydney and Melbourne after losing the talent that built the KIIS brand.

But there is one mistake it can avoid: making Kyle Sandilands the opposition.

During ARN’s earnings call, chief executive Michael Stephenson revealed the new shows would launch this year and offered one detail about both: they will be “live and free”.

It was a pointed choice of words. Kyle Sandilands Live is built around a paid subscription, giving ARN an obvious contrast to draw between his service and commercial radio.

This strategy has been tried before in radio, to terrible results.

Free FM should be a warning

When Howard Stern left New York’s 92.3 K-Rock for Sirius Satellite Radio at the end of 2005, owner Infinity Broadcasting faced much the same problem: how do you replace a personality who has become inseparable from the station?

Its answer was Free FM.

K-Rock became 92.3 Free FM and ex-Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth was installed in breakfast, surrounded by a broader line-up of personality-driven talk shows. The proposition was impossible to miss. Stern might now be behind a satellite radio subscription, but here was personality radio you could still hear for free.

It didn't work. Roth was gone within months, and the station ultimately returned to the K-Rock brand.

That doesn't mean ARN is destined for the same result. Australian radio in 2026 is not New York radio in 2006, and I don't think they're in any rush to rebrand KIIS.

But if you're going to define KIIS by what Sandilands is doing, then you've given him a huge amount of power over your product.

KIIS has Kyle in its DNA

It's especially tricky for KIIS, because Sandilands helped create its identity.

When Sandilands and Jackie O Henderson left 2Day FM for ARN in 2013, Mix 106.5 was subsequently relaunched as KIIS 1065. Henderson later revealed that the rebrand was Sandilands’ idea.

According to Henderson, Sandilands had worked behind the scenes on the move, proposing the KIIS name to ARN as part of his plan to leave 2Day FM.

For ARN, moving on from Sandilands also means moving on from someone who helped create KIIS.

That makes defining its next era in opposition to Sandilands particularly dangerous.

READ MORE: 'Live and free': ARN boss takes swipe at Kyle as revenue falls 14%

READ MORE: The who's who of Kyle Sandilands new team

Stephenson told Mediaweek that ARN is not competing with Sandilands because the two businesses operate under fundamentally different models.

“We’re an advertising model, we’re about mass reach, and a subscription business is usually niche and small. We’re not competing with Kyle,” he said.

Well, sure. But the average listener isn't going to see it that way.

Currently, it's just an offhand statement from an executive. But if ‘live and free’ becomes a brand identity, and I am sitting through one of commercial radio’s longer ad breaks and repeatedly hearing sweepers that KIIS is ‘live and free’, I am not thinking about ARN’s ‘mass-reach advertising model’.

I'm thinking that, for 27 cents a day, I can hear Kyle Sandilands Live with no ad breaks at all.

Build a show, not an anti-Kyle

The next step for KIIS isn't as tricky to navigate as it seems.

A smattering of the people who helped make The Kyle & Jackie O Show work are still there. Producers who know the audience, know the station and know how to make great radio.

Use them.

Give that team a real say in what comes next, rather than handing them another celebrity-led concept to execute. Let the new show find its own voice.

ARN’s recent experiments suggest they may be looking in the wrong direction.

The Long Weekend launched on GOLD with Karl Stefanovic and Eddie McGuire in June. Within weeks, Stefanovic was gone following advertiser backlash over his independent podcast.

When a radio company increasingly populated by former Nine executives reaches for Stefanovic and McGuire, it is reasonable to wonder whether television fame is being given too much weight in decisions about what makes good radio.

Coming to KIIS: Tracy Grimshaw for breakfast! Mornings with Kerri-Anne Kennerley! And ‘Mad’ Mike Munro driving you home!

You're running a radio company surrounded by some of the medium's greatest minds, with decades of combined experience. You should work with them. Don't just ring up your TV mates.

It’s worth noting that some of the staff ARN decided it could do without have already been picked up by Sandilands. That should probably tell the network something about where experienced radio people believe their value will be recognised.

The KIIS audience has been very loyal to Kyle. If you turn the next KIIS breakfast show into a loyalty test, you will lose.

“Live” is a characteristic. “Free” is a price. Neither is a reason to listen.

If ARN really is not competing with Kyle, it should stop talking like it is.

Because if every conversation about the new KIIS starts with Sandilands, he's still setting the agenda, even from outside the building.