CHANGE is the hardest word in any arts person’s vocabulary, as the board of Canberra’s ArtSound FM has been finding.

The shock announcement came in mid-October last year that the venerable and often musty arts station would go off air while the board tackled declining listener numbers and funding through a campaign called “Donate, Participate, Rejuvenate”.

While that elicited some positive responses, it also unleashed an angry groundswell of fear and loathing from volunteer presenters, some who’d been with the station for 15 years or more, exacerbated by an edict that presenters would not be permitted to select the music for their own programs. It led to 12-14 of them resigning.

President, Amalijah Thompson announced that all committees would be spilled and reconstituted, with a temporary program grid consisting of automated music selections and syndicated programs which would also feature pre-recorded messages about the campaign.

But even the most optimistic supporters queried the wisdom of dropping live programming while simultaneously appealing for donations.

Now nearly six months later, amidst a further decline in listener numbers, programs are dominated by an automated mix of music, programs sourced from the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia’s Community Radio Network and local arts programs, pre-recorded offsite.

After weathering smoke, hailstone damage and disaffection, the board is now battling the impacts of COVID-19 and in a newsletter sent to members on April 2, it reported that while one staffer would continue in the office, all live broadcasts would cease until further notice, and that volunteers had been asked to pre-record programs from home. The new morning program “ArtSound Daily”, due to start on April 30, would be delayed.

Last week Thompson spoke frankly to “CityNews” about the difficulties of initiating change in a volunteer-run organisation.

“I recall that when we took over on the board, we heard lots of things from people who were concerned about standards, and we wanted to address all of that with some success but it was an uphill battle,” she said.

Everything had changed in community radio from the time when ArtSound’s predecessor Canberra Stereo Public Radio first transmitted in 1983, and broadcasters were having to confront different forms of technology. Funding bodies like the Community Broadcasting Foundation were changing their funding models and sponsorship was going online.

Donors and participants of the Canberra community commented that ArtSound was in trouble, and confirmed that the station had lost listeners and needed to deliver “something that matters”. Thompson agrees that this notion is subjective, since one person might really like a presenter while another can’t stand them, so the approach was to set up a program training body.

“The question was how to stay relevant for audiences and how to fund ourselves,” Thompson said.

“It was very different in the 1970s and 1980s, but what was the same was the connection with audiences, you had to deliver something they wanted.” 

However with six community radio stations in the immediate region, the lines were getting blurred – “it seemed that ArtSound had lost its uniqueness.”

When you start to implement change, everybody is unhappy, the board discovered.

“We got lots of feedback, some negative but mostly positive, so when we had no live programming for a couple of months, some were horrified, others were relieved and some were very pleased with the automatic music component, saying the quality was improved,” Thompson said.

Costs were a factor. The cost of running ArtSound in 2018 when she joined the board was between $800 and $1000 a day. Last year they got funding and a donation to pay staff so they had some continuity and focus, but all the while without a station manager.

As for accessing professional advice, she said, “that’s all very well, but if you take the ABC, they employ their presenters, they have contracts and they can fire them… it’s such a different dynamic dealing with volunteers.”

To complicate matters, when Thompson joined the board it was no secret that there was a long-standing internal dispute over which the previous board was forced out, so there were a lot of expectations placed on the new board.

“We had to be a bit bold and unusual, but all we did was to interrupt live programming for a limited period of time,” she said. 

“No presenters were got rid of, but the reaction was incredible – ‘how dare you take us off?’”

“We’ve gone through smoke, hail damage and now the virus just when we were in a period of trying to reboot the financial situation, so there must be permanent base funding from the Community Broadcasting Foundation, which must take into account the reality of present-day community radio and sustainability.

“My hope is in the work we do with other community stations.”