Qantas Pulls Music From In-Flight Entertainment Because Hardly Anyone Is Listening

Qantas has officially pressed the stop button on its in-flight entertainment music catalogue, because apparently less than 10% of passengers are actually listening.

“Our research showed that fewer and fewer of our customers are tuning into the radio and music channels,” a spokesperson for the flying kangaroo tells Australian Frequent Flyer.

“It also indicated that many passengers on both domestic and international flights bring their own device with music already downloaded.”

Following a review, Qantas’s radio stations, music playlists and CD library collections have now all been removed from the in-flight entertainment catalogue on domestic and some international flights (Denpasar, Noumea, Port Moresby and New Zealand), with the airline to apparently replace them with a limited number of podcasts.

The reaction online has been pretty unimpressed so far, with the head of Aussie music rights organisation APRA AMCOS suggesting that sh*tty curation could be to blame for passengers turning away from the airline’s playlists:

Other Aussie music pundits have also weighed in with their thoughts on why removing the music won’t, ahem, fly.

Read what they had to say below.