Smooth 80s streams a dedicated run of 1980s pop and rock, from Madonna and Michael Jackson to Bon Jovi, as a digital-only channel of Australia's smoothfm radio network. Press play on Radio Shuffle and it streams instantly, free, with no account or app download required.
A network that took three tries to find its sound
Smooth 80s belongs to a network with a surprisingly rocky history for something now branded around easy listening. According to Wikipedia's account of smoothfm, the Sydney and Melbourne FM licences that now carry the brand first went to air in 2005 as Vega, a talk-and-music station that dropped talk entirely around 2006. After Lachlan Murdoch bought into the company in 2009, the struggling Vega brand was relaunched again as Classic Rock, before Nova programming staff Tony Thomas and Paul Jackson developed an entirely new concept that finally stuck: smoothfm, which launched on 21 May 2012 aimed at women aged 35 and over.
From one easy-listening format to a family of digital decades
smoothfm's core stations, Smooth 95.3 in Sydney and Smooth 91.5 in Melbourne, built their early identity on ballads and more music, less talk. That changed again in February 2020, when the flagship format shifted to adult contemporary under the new slogan "your feel good station." The same year, Nova Entertainment used that momentum to expand the brand digitally, launching Smooth 80s and Smooth 90s as standalone, era-specific channels alongside the earlier Smooth Relax and Smooth Chill (since renamed Smooth Vintage) digital stations. Nova has reported its DAB+ audience roughly doubling since February 2020, with Smooth 80s among the fastest-growing individual channels in that expansion.
A sister station on the other side of the world, by coincidence
Australia's Smooth 80s is not connected to the UK station of the same name. Global's Smooth network in Britain launched its own Smooth 80s in September 2024, as part of what it called the biggest single radio launch in UK history, but that station grew out of a completely different lineage, a former Jazz FM network with no ownership link to Nova Entertainment. Two companies on opposite sides of the planet landed on the identical name and concept for the identical decade, purely because "80s" needs no further explanation to draw a nostalgic audience.
Listen free on Radio Shuffle
Smooth 80s streams around the clock, and Radio Shuffle carries the feed live with nothing to install and no subscription required. Press play for a full decade of pop and rock hits from one of Nova Entertainment's fastest-growing digital stations.