If you can recognise old school Destiny’s Child you’re probably all over RNB Fridays

In June last year some savvy street teams (the ones that drive the network-branded vehicles around for promotions) at radio station Hit 107 in Adelaide pitched an idea to music director Irene Hulme.

For one day the station would only play old school R&B. ‘Old school’ meaning from the early 90s to the mid 2000s. Think Destiny’s Child, Nelly, Usher, Missy Elliot, Craig David, TLC, Jennifer Lopez, Ja Rule, OutKast, Coolio — even back to Salt N Pepa, Kris Kross and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.

The experiment worked. And the instant ratings boost saw the rest of the Hit network nationwide take note.

“We saw the huge impact it had in Adelaide, and it’s very hard to make an impact in Adelaide,” Dave Cameron, head of National Content and Development at Southern Cross Austereo radio network, says.

Herre he comes: Nelly is a staple of RNB Fridays and is now headlining their first tour.Source:Supplied

“What’s that saying? Success has many fathers and failure is an orphan? There’s probably 173 people who’ll put their hand up and say RNB Fridays was their idea.”

They tried RNB Fridays in Sydney. It worked there too.

Melbourne watched Sydney and tried it the next week. Another automatic hit.

“The reaction was like nothing we’d seen, we decided to roll it out for the next four weeks and it continued over that four weeks to grow tenfold,” Cameron says. “We watched our stream numbers go through the week. You can literally watch those figures with streaming now.

“The people who weren’t listening to us Monday to Thursday were making RNB Fridays a real destination to come to us. Which is unheard of for radio for the most part these days. You usually get in the car, flick through the stations —it’s passive. Whereas RNB Fridays were making our stations a destination, not unlike Triple J’s Hottest 100 and other big event radio. And they’re now sticking with us during the rest of the week.”

It’s become a national weekly fixture every Friday; with a loyal fanbase. Dannii Minogue is a famous fan, pumping RNB Fridays when taking her son to school, the pair singing along in the car.

Commercial radio is usually ruthlessly formatted, with songs tested regularly and stations relying on data from overseas before tracks can get playlisted.

Cameron said all that goes out of the window with RNB Fridays.

“Nothing we play on Fridays is researched and tested, it’s all based on gut feelings and listener response. It’s fun to be spontaneous. Commercial radio is very researched and very trained, it has to be, we’re all targeting certain audiences, we have demographics to achieve. To have a day where we throw the rule book out and play what is fun, what feels good and what people remember and that’s the biggest day of our listening audience there has to be something to be said for that.”

Old school. TLC’s classic line-up featuring the Lisa 'Left Eye' Lopes (left) and Chilli and T-Boz.Source:News Limited

The Hit Network’s demographic is women — 70 per cent of listeners are females under 40.

Most songs on RNB Friday come from the mid 90s to mid 2000s window.

“That’s the era our audience remember being in love with these songs,” Cameron says. “We throw in earlier stuff — some MC Hammer from the early 90s, some Salt N Pepa from the late 80s. We don’t go too far back, we don’t want to get out of that passion pocket where our audiences have grown up. We’re certainly not going to start playing Diana Ross and the Supremes. It’s not about discovering a song from 50 Cent’s album you’ve never heard before, RNB Friday is about playing people’s favourite RNB songs, familiarity is about the very centre of it.

“RNB Friday turns into a bit like Hamish and Andy’s appeal, it’s mothers and daughters and everyone in-between. It’s such a broad genre. Even 18 year olds are loving listening and discovering Ginuwine’s Pony and some mid 90s classics. That’s what the now mums remember as being the hot songs from that era.”

The success of the “sub brand” saw the network explore was to explore other opportunities.

Last October they released a double album RNB Fridays with major label Universal, featuring classics including Destiny’s Child’s Say My Name, Nelly’s Hot in Herre, TLC’s Waterfalls, R Kelly’s Ignition (remix), Kelis’ Milkshake, Montell Jordan’s This Is How We Do It, The Fugees’ Killing Me Softly, Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, Blackstreet’s No Diggity, Arrested Development’s People Everyday and Mark Morrison’s Return of the Mack.

Southern Cross Austereo's Dave CameronSource:Supplied

Matt Gudinski of Illusive/MushroomSource:News Corp Australia

It went double platinum (over 140,000 sales) and a second volume was released in April, this time chosen from some of the most popular songs from listeners, including Salt N Pepa’s Shoop, Jagged Edge’s Let’s Get Married, Craig David’s 7 Days, Amerie’s 1 Thing, Notorious B. I. G’s Hypnotize, All Saints’ Never Ever and Ginuwine’s Pony. That album is already platinum.

RNB Friday rolls out each Friday starting at 8am in the breakfast shows nationally, then takes over the day’s music until Hamish and Andy, then the urban music kicks in again from 10pm.

The Southern Cross Austereo network moved to the next logical step — RNB Friday branded club shows in Melbourne and Perth (where they’re a Friday fixture) and water-testing nights in Sydney and Brisbane. The theory being listening at 10pm will get people ready to head to RNB Fridays - the club.

“The hope is that Melbourne has been the great case for how we extend RNB Fridays into a club space,” Cameron says.

After one-off parties linked to their breakfast shows with Chingy in Melbourne and Bow Wow in Sydney, Southern Cross Austereo is now launching a full RNB Fridays tour.

In the past the radio network tried their hand at promoting their own multi-act shows with the pop driven Rumba and rock event M1; inspired by overseas radio concerts.

Blackstreet’s No Diggity has been covered by Chet FakerSource:News Corp Australia

This is how he does it: singer Montell Jordan.Source:News Limited

Forming a partnership with Frontier Touring and Illusive, their inaugural event will feature Nelly, TLC, Montell Jordan, Mya, Blackstreet, Blu Cantrell, 112, Dante Thomas, Fatman Scoop and Kevin Lyttle touring nationally in November.

“It felt like the time was really right to explode this,” Cameron said. “It’s a really good marriage with Frontier, maybe a marriage we should have done 10 years ago.”

Matt Gudinski of Frontier grew up listening to 90s R&B and was the first Australian promoter who managed to convince Drake to tour here.

“There’s such an interest in nostalgia at the minute,” Gudinski said. “There’s multiple tours with 90s R&B artists in Australia this year. But there’s a lot of these gigs around doing it with one member of various acts. There’s a tour with one member of Ace of Base in Australia right now. What we’ve tried to do, with the obvious exception of TLC (whose rapper Lisa Lopes passed away), is bring artists who are still performing with their full line up, not a mish mash of talent. We’ve got artists doing full sets, it’s going to be a much bigger production than just a few names getting up and playing their hits from 15 years ago.”

RNB Fridays live will feature four acts, including Nelly and TLC playing full sets (the latter with a full band and dancers), while others with less hits will be playing with a DJ.

“Some artists will get up for 10 minutes and play two or three songs, others will play for 45 or 50 minute sets,” Gudinski explained. “It’s going to be a five or six hour, all evening event. There’s going to be R&B karaoke going on, an RNB nightclub on site playing hits from the 90s and early 2000s, dancers, lots of different stuff going on on the day. It’s not one artist getting up and doing their song, then another artist getting up and doing their song, they’ll be playing full sets.”

The first RNB Fridays album went double platinumSource:Supplied

R&B and urban package tours are nothing new. They’ve also got a controversial history, like Supafest, where promoters literally posted photos of the artists arriving in Australia on their Facebook page so fans knew they would definitely be performing. Or Soulfest, where a stage of Australian acts was axed without warning. Other events have changed line-ups abruptly or have seen fans moaning after the event about bad production or security.

Gudinski is hoping to reversal the bad reputation urban and R&B festivals have had in Australia in recent years, starting with RNB Fridays.

“It’s been a combination of the promoters behind the event and the artists they’ve chosen to book,” Gudinski says of the chequered history of the genre.

“Some R&B festivals and these bigger urban events have struggled in the past. We haven’t really tried our luck at it yet until now. With Frontier’s background and working with artists we’ve got a history with we’re expecting this to go smoothly.

“A lot of these artists, not the ones on our bill, but in the genre, have a history of no-shows. My only concern putting this event together was that a lot of people might look at the line up and really want to go but will they might have been burnt in the past at one of those other events. Hopefully this can be the start of really reigniting urban and R & B and hip hop festivals as big events in Australia.”

The RNB Fridays tour plays Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena on November 18, Eatons Hill Brisbane November 19, The Gates at NIB Stadium Perth November 20 and Hisense Arena Melbourne November 25.

Tickets on sale Thursday September 8.

You love him: Usher (here in 1997) is RNB Friday’s most-played artistSource:AP