So Lachlan Murdoch has shown his media smarts.

After buying 50% of DMG Australia for $112 million, the lesser Murdoch has concluded the only way to make this cut-price deal pay is to increase the number of ads on the ailing Nova network, and get rid of the failed format at the Vega stations in Sydney and Melbourne and chase the larger audience listening to Triple M’s classic rock music.

Why was it cut price for Lachie? Well DMG had paid about $156 million just for the Sydney and Melbourne licences, a millions more for ones in Brisbane and other cities. (DMG, under its UK ownership has spent the best part of $400 million to $600 million in the past 15 years buying and selling radio licences in Australia). The UK parent’s finances were being strained by the brutal recession, they were willing to deal to get the millstone off its balance sheet.

So Lachie got a cut-price radio network, which was run like a cut-price radio network.

Sensible? smart? No, just financially driven. He is like all other Australian radio owners, driven by the beans, the need to be safe, and not the flavour or the need to be different.

In the first radio ratings surveys for 2010, Vega had just 3.1% of the Sydney radio audience and 3.7% in Melbourne. But the real story is in what happened to the audiences of its main rival and the target of its new format, Austero’s Triple M.

CEO Cathy O’Connor said in a statement: “In building these new stations we knew we needed a simple, focused music concept that would appeal to the 35-54 audience. Classic Rock 95.3FM and Classic Rock 91.5FM provides exactly that.”

No doubt they crunched the numbers, fiddled with the dials and tuned the cat’s whiskers on the crystal ball in conducting what DMG called an “extensive strategic review”.

And that no doubt involved looking at the latest radio share and audience figures from survey one.

The Sydney audience for Vega fell to 3.1% from 3.7% in the last survey of 2009. the cumulative Monday-Friday audience rose by 3000 to 255,000. In Melbourne the share fell to 3.7% from from 4.7% in the last 2009 survey (that’s an ouch). And the audience fell to 262,000 Monday to Friday from 280,000.

Over at Triple M, there was “gold” (relatively speaking). In Sydney its share rose to 5.2 from a Vega-like 3.5 at the end of last year. the audience jumped a very Vega unlike 89,000 to 446,000.

In Melbourne Triple M did even better, share up 1.7 to 5.9 and the audience up 97,000 to 464,000. Whoopee, but there’s a reason for this. Eddie McGuire and his new breakfast team. They added 77,000 over the survey Monday to Friday, which is most of the increase (and more people listened through the rest of the day).

Perhaps the smartest thing Murdoch and his team of creative strategists could have done would have been to hire McGuire before Austero did. That’s probably a bit unfair because Murdoch and the Pommie DMG managers were apparently talking for a while before the deal was announced late last year. In that time Austero moved to boost Triple M and made Vega’s life even tougher.

But Nova’s managers (the other network) were floundering. They badly mishandled the changes at Nova Sydney in the breakfast shift that alienated listeners and former talent.

The other one that would have put Vega on the map, especially in Sydney, would have been mad boy Kyle Sandilands on 2Day. He had a tough year at 2Day and probably could have kicked up a stink and tried to walk on Austero. But the network would have been noticed by potential listeners and many of the younger ones are listening to Kyle and Jacki O on 2Day.

The strategy of going after a rival’s market isn’t the the most original idea in the media, but its safe when you don’t have a clue, the people you’ve bought have lost the plot and there’s $100 million or more on the table.

Reviving Vega and Nova needs something dramatic, a bit like the splash John Singleton is getting from a credulous Melbourne media in his approaching move into the market by buying Steve Price and a half share in the underperforming SEN.