A world of music

WorldSpace may have roped in A R Rahman, but he's yet to make magic.

"There is a music lover in each one of us," says Harshad Jain, chief marketing officer, WorldSpace India. It is these music lovers WorldSpace has been trying to cater to.

While WorldSpace might be an unknown entity when it entered the country in 2005, it has found quite a few takers of late. According to Jain, the subscription base has been growing decently and the number of subscribers is close to 1,70,000.

On the advertising front, however, WorldSpace has not been very lucky. A R Rahman might have done wonders for the Airtel campaign but he has found it a tad difficult to repeat the trick with WorldSpace.

The latest campaign of WorldSpace featuring Rahman has four different commercials targeted at music lovers of different genres like Hindi, Indian classical, hip hop and rock.

The first of the series has a middle-aged man listening to old Hindi music on his LP, which gets stuck. At this point, Rahman comes in and says that if you are a music lover, then switch to WorldSpace.

The campaign is targeted at people in the age group 15-50 years and takes from the incidents which people can easily relate to. "What we want to tell people is that they invest a lot of time and money to get their kind of music and yet seem to be not satisfied. On the other hand, it is a different ball game with us," he says, adding that the campaign was conceived with an aim to reach out to more consumers and tell them about the variety that WorldSpace offers.

Currently present in 33 cities, the company is looking at using both print and TV in a big way for the campaign. Jain claims that the renewal rate for subscription has been close to 90 per cent. With regard to ad spends Jain says, "We won't be spending lavishly on promotions but wouldn't be stingy either."

He is also looking at regional campaigns in the future. "WorldSpace offers Tamil music to a Tamilian living in Jalandhar and Bengali music to a Bengali living in Cochin. So regional campaigns are definitely on our agenda."

In terms of other promotional activities, while the company has tie-ups with Barista and Cafe Coffee Day in certain cities, it is not looking at future tie-ups with other companies. "We know that places like gyms and restaurants have WorldSpace and hope that the trend continues." For the moment, all we can wonder is: Rahman ka magic chalega kya?