Bruno’s microphone was clipping so hard by about 6:15am that every time he raised his voice it sounded like a blown speaker in a Commodore. It wasn’t a bit hot either, it was properly distorting, the crunchy overdriven mush you get when someone slams a gain knob to the right and walks away from the desk.
Nobody fixed it for ages. An hour and 44 minutes in, Kyle was still on air explaining that he’d had to drag Bruno’s mic right down because he’s so loud, and that there was a lot of tweaking going on as he spoke. That’s most of the show gone with someone under the desk still trying to make it work.
I paid the $99 for a year of Kyle Sandilands Live, same as roughly 20,000 other people, which TV Blackbox worked out at close to $2 million banked before a single minute went to air. Kyle’s been off air six months since the Kyle & Jackie O show fell over, the ARN split got him a $12 million settlement, and the pitch was simple. His own studio, his own staff, no ads, nobody upstairs telling him what he can say. He’s self-funding the whole thing. 6am to 10am, Monday to Friday, audio and video, callers on video instead of phones.
I handed the money over happily. Take the ad breaks out, take the station lawyers out, take the format clock out, and you get the version of Kyle that made him worth listening to in the first place. It’s a good idea and I still think that after the morning I’ve had. Which is why the morning I’ve had is so annoying.
The audio was a disaster. Bruno’s mic was the worst offender but nobody’s levels were sitting where they should have been. There was echo on the line at various points, like someone had a monitor speaker open into a live mic. Mics that were supposed to be on were muted, so you’d get someone talking into a dead channel and half a sentence would vanish before an engineer somewhere flicked it back. Then whoever was riding the desk would overcorrect and the next person would come through like a car alarm. Four hours of somebody learning what a fader does in front of a paying audience.
The video callers did my head in. Video calls are the one thing this show has that regular radio doesn’t, and you could barely hear them. They’d come in at a whisper against Bruno peaking into the red, so you’d crank the volume to hear the caller and then get your head taken off two seconds later. It’s the Christopher Nolan school of audio mixing. Dialogue you need subtitles for, then a noise that wakes the neighbours.
Then they got Pauline Hanson on. Kyle rang her from his own mobile and ran the phone through his mic, so one of the biggest guests of the morning came through like an auctioneer on a portable PA halfway down a suburban street. Echoey as fuck, every word arriving twice. There’s a whole video call system sitting in that studio and the leader of a federal party got patched in the way you’d put your nan on speaker at a barbecue.
Inside the first hour the wheels came off badly enough that they stopped and reset the entire show. Two million dollars of subscriptions and a studio full of staff, and the fix was the one your old man uses on the modem. RadioInfo’s review reported the same, plus phone lines crashing and the team not being able to hear each other at times. Kyle apparently couldn’t hear anything in his own headphones and pressed on anyway. Their verdict was that it was overwhelming and often unlistenable. The line they ran as their headline came from Kyle himself, who at one point said this is like regional radio. When the bloke paying for the studio is the one saying it on air, you know how the morning went.
We gotta talk about that music. Kyle made a point on air of saying he finally gets to play what he wants instead of whatever the record labels are pushing. Then he played this.
That’s a DJ Lamonnz edit of UB40’s Red Red Wine. A 1983 reggae cover of a 1967 Neil Diamond song, run through a remix, about an hour into day one of a show people paid for. Three separate generations have now had a crack at that song and the 2026 attempt is the one I paid $99 to hear.
And it wasn’t a one-off. There was a run of 80s remixes through the morning, the sort of thing you’d get at an under-18s blue light disco in 2009, or in a tyre shop waiting room, where at least it’s free and there’s a magazine.
He also played an AI generated remix. On the show that exists so a human gets to pick the music.
Ad-free is one of the selling points. Great. So why fill the gaps with cheap edits of songs I’ve heard 10,000 times? If the whole idea is that you’re free from a station’s playlist logs and format clocks, play something. Anything.
The music is also the one part of the morning nobody can pin on a dodgy cable, because someone sat down in advance and chose it. Somebody in that building needs to take the aux cord off him.
Kyle himself was filthy about it and he had every right to be. He didn’t bother hiding it either. He called it out live, repeatedly, and named names while it was still happening, Bruno copping most of it. He got shirty when Bruno swore inside the first half hour, and by the time a Zoom with psychic medium John Edward started dropping audio he sounded like a bloke watching his own money burn. Which he was.
Worth noting that the psychic did not see it coming. Bloke can reach your dead nan but the audio on his own Zoom was a total surprise to him.
Around the same point he came out with “you know what, I should have taken all that money and fucked off overseas, never to see you dogs again. But no, I’m not that sort of man.” He’s not wrong either. With $12 million out of ARN and another $2 million from us, he absolutely could have.
That’s the studio while it’s being repaired underneath them, live, on the paid product. My read is that Kyle walked in on Monday thinking this was sorted. Somebody had told him it was under control and it wasn’t, and he found out at the same moment 20,000 of us did. Being dark about that in public beats the alternative, where he smiles through four hours and pretends nobody can hear what they can obviously hear.
That’s the bit that gets me. This isn’t a couple of blokes with a Blue Yeti in a spare room. He’s built a proper studio, pulled a swag of people out of ARN with him including Brooklyn Ross, Jaimee Blazquez, Alfie Laguzza, Dean Royston and Bruno, brought Ella Kanna back from Seven, and hired Mary Madigan off news.com.au to do proper news bulletins. That’s a serious payroll. There’s money in that room, and it sounded worse than a community station running on gear somebody’s uncle donated in 1998.
You get one launch day. The largest audience this show will ever have was sitting there at 5:50am waiting to see whether the $99 was worth it, and a decent chunk of them got distortion and dead mics.
Then again, look at how fast this thing came together. Bruno only confirmed the 10 August date a few weeks out. They were still announcing on-air signings three days before launch when Brooklyn Ross’s move from ARN went public, and Ella Kanna came back from Seven the same week. A studio, an app, a billing system, a video call system and a full cast, most of it stood up inside about a month. New room, new desk, new routing, staff who’ve never worked this rig together, and a video layer sitting on top of a radio show. The odds of a clean first morning were close to zero.
A week of dress runs with fake callers would’ve caught most of it, and that’s clearly what got skipped to make the date.
But this is how you get better at it. You find out what’s broken by doing it in front of people and then you don’t do it again on Tuesday. Nobody sorts out monitor feeds and caller levels sitting in a meeting talking about it.
Traditional radio is going to have an absolute field day with this, and some of them already have. There were programming directors around this country listening at 6am on Monday the way you’d watch a rival’s car get towed. Fair enough, the faults were real and I’ve just spent a thousand words on them. But the same trade press that’s spent months running the numbers on whether Kyle can survive without a network behind him has an obvious interest in Monday being remembered as a disaster. It was a bad morning. One bad morning isn’t a verdict on the whole thing.
There was a lot of complaining when they launched with no monthly option, mine included. Yearly or nothing, $99, pay it all now. In hindsight that might be the smartest call anyone at that company has made. Nobody could rage-cancel at 10:05am on Monday because there was nothing to cancel. The money’s already in.
They’ve got room to fix it, too. Roughly $2 million up front and Kyle reckons the bills are covered for two and a half years, and none of it evaporates over one bad show. The bill comes due in July next year, when everyone who paid in decides whether they’re paying again, and Wade Kingsley reckons cost is behind nearly half of all subscription cancellations. They’ve got 12 months to make today forgettable. That’s plenty.
So crack the whip, Kyle. Get someone competent on that desk, put Bruno’s channel through a limiter and Bruno through a door, sort the caller feeds. Then have a hard look at the music, because that one’s on you.
I’ll be up at 6am tomorrow. I’ve paid for the year, remember. They’ve got me either way.