About Mix 94.5

Mix 94.5

Mix 94.5 is Perth's adult-contemporary commercial radio station, owned by Southern Cross Austereo and broadcasting as the Western Australian member of the Hit Network on 94.5 FM. The station's lineage stretches back to 1941, when it began life as 6KY — Perth's fourth and last commercial AM station — and its history encompasses union ownership, newspaper proprietors, Alan Bond's media empire and the modern network era. Since December 2020 it has carried the Hit Network's contemporary-hit format, and since January 2025 its breakfast show has been broadcast across regional Western Australia as well.

Overview

Mix 94.5 programs an adult-contemporary / hot adult-contemporary format: current hits and recent favourites aimed squarely at the mainstream 25–54 audience, with the Hit Network's national drive and evening shows complementing local Perth breakfast and daytime programming. The station's proposition is mass-appeal feel-good radio — familiar songs, high-energy presentation, big promotions and a strong local identity in the shifts that matter most. As part of the Hit Network — alongside Sydney's 2Day FM, Melbourne's Fox FM, Brisbane's B105 and Adelaide's SAFM — it carries network programs while retaining local breakfast, the daypart that defines a station's relationship with its city. The station streams through Southern Cross Austereo's LiSTNR platform, extending the 94.5 broadcast to digital and on-demand audiences.

History

The station began as 6KY, commencing broadcasting on 23 October 1941 on 1210 kHz — Perth's fourth and last commercial AM station, arriving a decade after 6PR. Its original home at 17–19 James Street in East Perth was the first building in Western Australia constructed specifically as a radio station, housing five studios and an auditorium, and the station was then owned by the Australian Workers' Union. The union years gave the station a distinctive character, and 6KY became the training ground for a significant number of notable Western Australian announcers' early careers.

Ownership changed repeatedly through the postwar decades. The station was started by AWA (Amalgamated Wireless Australasia); in 1968 it was bought by News Ltd, owner of the Sunday Times, Western Australia's Sunday newspaper; ownership then passed to Channel 9, and with the 1984 Bond Media takeover 6KY was sold back to AWA. Through the 1980s, with commercial FM arriving, the station experimented with talk and easy-listening formats in search of a new audience — a common story for AM stations of the era, which watched their music audiences migrate to the clearer sound and fresher presentation of FM. The talk experiments kept the station relevant to an older, news-hungry audience, but the long-term answer was the FM band itself. By 1987 it was owned by Wesgo, and in December 1989 it was sold to businessman Jack Bendat, who would hold it through the FM conversion.

The FM conversion transformed the station. On 1 June 1991, 6KY became 6JKY on 94.5 MHz FM; in 1997, after Austereo acquired the station from Bendat, it was renamed Mix 94.5 — the new name reflecting its adult-contemporary format — with the callsign becoming 6MIX. In 2016, when Southern Cross Austereo amalgamated the LocalWorks regional network into the Triple M network, Mix 94.5 kept its independent branding while taking more networked shows. Then, on 1 December 2020, came the affiliation switch that redefined Perth commercial radio: Mix 94.5 moved from the Triple M network to the Hit Network, while sister station Hit 92.9 relaunched as Triple M 92.9. The swap gave each of SCA's Perth stations a sharper identity — contemporary hits on 94.5, rock and sport on 92.9. A further expansion followed: from January 2025, the Mix 94.5 breakfast show began broadcasting throughout regional Western Australia across the Hit Network's regional stations, making the Perth breakfast team a statewide institution.

Programming

The Mix 94.5 schedule blends local Perth programming with the Hit Network's national shows. Breakfast is the flagship — a local, personality-driven show built on humour, celebrity interviews, listener calls and the big-money promotions that are the Hit Network's trademark. Daytime programming carries the hot adult-contemporary music mix with local presenters, while network shows take the key national dayparts: Carrie & Tommy in drive, Fifi, Fev & Nick's Happy Hour, and The Hot Hits with Nic Kelly and Loren Barry through the evenings. The music policy targets the broad mainstream: current chart hits, recent recurrents and familiar favourites from the past two decades, programmed for at-work and in-car listening. The hot adult-contemporary positioning is deliberate — contemporary enough to feel current against Nova's younger Top 40 sound, familiar enough to hold the at-work audience through the day. The station's promotions — cash giveaways, concert tickets, money-can't-buy experiences — are central to the Hit Network brand and to Mix's competitive position against Nova 93.7, and the breakfast show's expansion to regional WA has given those promotions a statewide stage.

Coverage and Audience

Mix 94.5 broadcasts across the Perth metropolitan area on 94.5 FM, with streaming and podcast catch-up through the LiSTNR app extending its reach nationally. Since January 2025 its breakfast show has also aired across regional Western Australia on the Hit Network's regional stations — from Albany to Broome, Geraldton to Kalgoorlie — giving the station a genuinely statewide footprint in the mornings. Its audience is the commercial radio heartland: the 25–54 mainstream, slightly female-skewing, that advertisers prize for retail, automotive, entertainment and household categories. In Perth the station's direct competitor is Nova 93.7, with the two stations contesting the contemporary-hit audience; the 2020 network realignment sharpened that contest by giving Mix the Hit Network's full contemporary arsenal. The rivalry is one of the most closely watched in Australian radio: two well-resourced, professionally programmed hit-music stations fighting for the same mainstream audience, with breakfast the decisive battleground. Mix's heritage — the 6KY lineage and three decades as Mix — gives it a depth of local brand equity that the younger Nova, for all its network firepower, has had to work hard to match.

Ownership

Mix 94.5 is owned and operated by Southern Cross Austereo as part of the Hit Network, with Triple M 92.9 as its Perth sister station. Southern Cross Austereo — formed in 2011 from the merger of Southern Cross Media Group and Austereo — is one of Australia's largest commercial radio and regional television operators, and its Hit and Triple M networks span metropolitan and regional markets nationally. The station operates under a commercial broadcasting licence from the Australian Communications and Media Authority. The ownership arc from the Australian Workers' Union through News Ltd, Bond Media, Wesgo, Bendat and Austereo to SCA mirrors the consolidation of Australian commercial radio across eight decades.

Digital Presence

The station streams live and offers podcast catch-up through Southern Cross Austereo's LiSTNR platform — Wikipedia lists hit.listnr.com/perth/ as its website — alongside the Hit Network's national digital brands. LiSTNR, launched in February 2021, carries live streams of all SCA stations plus a large podcast library, and Mix 94.5's breakfast highlights, interviews and features are packaged for on-demand listening there. Social media channels promote the station's shows, competitions and events, with the visual, shareable content — pranks, celebrity moments, giveaway reveals — that drives the Hit Network's digital engagement. For a station that began in a purpose-built East Perth building in 1941, the journey from 1210 kHz AM to the smartphone app spans the entire history of Australian commercial radio — and Mix 94.5 has remained at the centre of Perth's dial through all of it.