Are podcasts the way forward for Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O to maintain their national profile?

It’s been three days since Australia’s biggest radio couple blew up, and the industry and the listeners are still reeling from the explosive news.

For a quarter of a century, Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “Jackie O” Henderson reigned supreme on the Sydney airwaves, and they seemed untouchable, surviving one scandal after another, to the bafflement of many. How did they get away with it all?

There were external forces at work but in the end, they were taken down by each other.

There appears to be no way back for commercial FM radio’s most formidable power players, who only two-and-a-half years ago had signed the most lucrative contract in Australian history.

At $200 million between them, over 10 years, it was worth more than the whole company – ARN’s market capitalisation is currently $114m.

By now, the road leading to the dust-up has been well-trodden. The bust-up over Henderson’s supposed astrology obsession was about much more than star positions.

The core of the conflict was about two people who could no longer brook each other’s eccentricities, personalities or workplace practices. It’s not entirely surprising given the longevity of their partnership, even the happiest newlyweds are not immune from eventual divorce.

It’s even less surprising when you consider the pressure the whole show had been under after its failed launch into the Melbourne market. Nerves have been fraying – on air, as so much of its internal dramas were played out – and there were cracks and fractures before the full chasm that opened between Sandilands and Henderson.

Henderson — who issued a statement on Friday afternoon clarifying that she did not “quit or resign” from the show — has already had her contract with ARN torn up, while Sandilands has been given two weeks to “remedy” what the company has termed an “act of misconduct”.

It’s been reported by Nine Newspapers that the only way Sandilands can do that is by convincing Henderson to return, something that seems impossible to achieve given he’s also been told to not contact her.

Given how unlikely a repairing of that relationship would be – but, hey, stranger things have happened, Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor reconciled their marriage after years apart – what’s next for two people whose names have almost always been uttered together?

Can they forge a media identity of their own, and still retain the same power and influence they’ve enjoyed as a collective?

The experience of The Kyle and Jackie O Show’s foray into Melbourne could be instructive.

It’s widely accepted that the reason it failed so spectacularly is that the show’s tone and personality did not gel with Sydney’s southern cousin.

The brash, vulgar and defiant vibe of the program, especially its sexually explicit content at a breakfast hour, was off-putting to Melbournians who hadn’t spent decades becoming slowly inured to it.

In Sydney, fans were rusted on, and the show traded back and forth the No.1 slot with 2GB’s Ben Fordham.

In Melbourne, the shock of, well, the shock jocks, was bracing and the city that considers itself to be more cultured and less showy, wasn’t having it. After two years, it the pair was No.8 in the ratings, having lost a considerable share of the market – and ad revenue – from when their predecessors were in the chair.

The Melbourne result exposed the fallacy of the marketing gloss that Sandilands and Henderson were a national force, and it put the brakes on plans on expanding their show around the country including Brisbane, which was to be the next territory.

Other than a brief stint hosting the top 40 countdown which was nationally syndicated, The Kyle and Jackie O Show was always about Sydney. They were able to leverage their success in what was Australia’s most populous city into gigs on national TV, but their profiles never had the same cachet in, for example, Perth or Adelaide. Certainly, not Melbourne – and what an expensive lesson that was.

But for either of them to reach anywhere near the same heights, at least in terms of a payday, both would have to be able to remake themselves as a national figure.

Let’s start with Henderson, because she might have an easier time to revamp her image and cast herself as someone freed from the more toxic imputations attached to The Kyle and Jackie O Show.

The way it all went down matters, because when you listen to the eight-minute audio of, essentially, their break-up, Henderson is clearly the bullied party. No matter what associations she may have been tagged with previously in terms of the show’s scandalous stunts, she too is now a victim of Sandilands’ aggressive manner.

That doesn’t mean it’ll be forgiven by all, in the same way that many Australian women have a hard time buying that former deputy prime minister Julie Bishop is now some sort of feminist icon in her post-parliamentary career when, while she was still in power in 2014, she famously declared that she wouldn’t describe herself as a feminist and she didn’t find the term useful.

But for many, Bishop has successfully reframed her public image as a friend of the (corporate) sisterhood, so it is possible for Henderson too to launch a new chapter.

Because the centre of media power has been in Sydney, her exposure in the radio market there means that she has been put on national magazine covers, and been given opportunities by all the editors, producers and marketing executives that also live in Sydney.

In the earlier years of reality TV, Henderson was the host of Popstars and more recently, was a panellist on The Masked Singer Australia. She and Sandilands were co-hosts of Big Brother in 2008, but that only lasted one year.

In 2024, Henderson and her friend and manager Gemma O’Neill had launched the podcast Her Best Life, a lifestyle program that discussed sex, relationships, careers and even astrology, clearly aimed at women.

Henderson had wrapped her on-air involvement in the show in February, and had even suggested that she had new perspectives on life that had come from three-and-a-half years of therapy.

It was Henderson and O’Neill that brought Gwyneth Paltrow to Australia for a 2023 live conversation where the tickets sold for $250 a head.

That alignment with lifestyle subjects feels even more possible if Henderson was no longer weighed down by the baggage of a combative daily radio program where her name came second in the line-up.

Will it be as lucrative as the contract she just broke? Perhaps not, at least not straight away. But if she could remake her image as someone who was safer, there are possibilities for endorsement deals (she had previously collaborated with Weight Watchers) with higher-end brands.

For Sandilands, he neither needs to nor can reframe himself as someone that won’t be protested against by activist groups targeting his advertisers.

It seems likely that the best move for Sandilands would be to shift away from mainstream commercial media companies who are sensitive to attempted boycotts or social movements.

There’s a whole world out there in the podcast land, and Sandilands could easily carry his audience, especially the men, over to his own program where he’s not bound by the vicissitudes of his detractors.

Also, podcasts, unless they were also broadcast over airwaves, don’t fall under the jurisdiction of ACMA.

Never again would Sandilands have to worry about complaints over decency, unless he breached the codes of Apple, Spotify or YouTube, but we’ve seen there is a lot of free speech latitudes on those tech platforms.

If Karl Stefanovic is trying to become the Joe Rogan of Australia with his recently launched podcast, Sandilands could easily give him a run for his money.

Sandilands has very clear appeal to audiences looking for that more aggressive, alpha male personality, and he doesn’t take it as far as the more unsavoury names in that space, so there are plenty of people who would choose to listen to any show he wants to do without feeling that they’re pushing into a fringe position. Sandilands would still be mainstream.

There are also plenty of advertisers looking to reach those men, and given that podcast is a medium of active choosing, rather than habitual broadcast, it gives more cover to those brands from boycott activists.

You can’t argue that someone is being accidentally subjected to Sandilands, nor would be even among the more extreme of the medium.

This week, ACMA released a report, Trends and Developments in Viewing and Listening 2024-25, which found 52 per cent of Australians listened to podcasts last year, which was only one point below that of the FM radio audience.

Podcast listeners were also more likely be in the 18 to 44 age group and living in a metro area, which are demographics advertisers really like.

So the opportunities for both Sandilands and Henderson are numerous, if they can work with smart people to get it right.

Perhaps the money and the influence won’t be commensurate with that $200m contract, at least not at the start, but these are growth areas, especially when you also throw YouTube in.

And when you consider that the narrative that the 2024 US Presidential Elections was the podcast election, there is obviously a lot of power and influence that they can both still amass, on their own.