Are you listening?

If you think all radio stations sound alike, think again. Discerning listeners know their Mirchi from their Fever

• Rekha, a former sex-worker, escaped from a brothel in New Delhi with the help of Shakti Vahini, an NGO. Her story, aired on Radio Mirchi, won an award at New York Festivals 2010.
• Fancy listening to Naseeruddin Shah’s Raavan and Anupam Kher’s Dashrath? Tune into Fever FM’s Radio Ramayan, aired thrice a day. 
• Laugh over Sud’s PJs on Radio Mirchi and Babbar Sher on Radio City. Ponder over Dhamaal 24’s Life Gulmohar Style, produced by BBC World Service, focusing on women’s issues in a fiction format. 
• And then there is music, lots of it, on all of India’s 280-odd private FM stations. There is the aspirational metro-ish music on Radio Mantra or mellower numbers on Radio City. There are super hits on Red FM and happy songs on Radio Mirchi.

The men and women behind radio stations in India work really hard to stand out in a cluttered market. Most of the large networks spend upwards of a crore on research in their bid to be different. “When people say there is no differentiation, it is all nonsense; those people are not radio listeners,” says S Keerthivasan, business head, Fever 104 FM. “Consumers can differentiate from the tone and manner of RJs (radio jockeys). They are key brand identity tags for radio networks,” says  Punitha Arumugam, CEO, Madison Media Group.

 

Lack of variety
Yet variety is an issue — there are no alternative music stations, for, say, jazz or Carnatic music, no 24-hour talk stations or news. There are two reasons for this.

One is regulation. News and current affairs are not allowed on private radio in India. An operator cannot own more than one station in the same city and cannot share content or operating facilities with sister stations. Much of this makes economies of scale almost impossible to achieve. Add royalty costs averaging about 20 per cent of revenues against 3-4 per cent globally. Since all operators have only one station per city to monetise, they go for the jugular. In India that means using film music — in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu or any other language . After all, film music forms over 70 per cent of all music sold in India. Most operators claim that if they had two or more stations per city, they would experiment far more.

Two — and you’re not going to like this — the audience is not evolved enough to appreciate niche music. WorldSpace (now defunct) offered, at Rs 135 a month, more than 40 ad-free music and talk radio channels in several languages such as Tamil, Telugu and even French. After eight years, all it had was about 175,000 subscribers, not enough to sustain a satellite radio channel. A large chunk of listeners is happy with what free radio is dishing out. Most experiments with free niche content haven’t worked either. Radio Mirchi and Radio One started as English music stations before quickly going the popular filmi route.

Format strategies
As the market stands, therefore, the whole differentiation game works at four basic levels.

The first is music versus non-music programming. “There is a slant towards non-music formats,” says Rahul Gupta, director, Shri Puran Multimedia (Radio Mantra). However, a bulk of the programming on radio is devoted to music.

The second level involves the genres within music and talk radio — say classical, filmi, jazz, devotional, comedy, horror and so on.

The third level is languages. So Kannada works well in Hubli or Bengali in Kolkata. The growth of private FM has, in fact, given a leg up to local music industries in Orissa, West Bengal and Karnataka — because of the increased demand for ringtones and other downloads.

The last level is how local or specific to a town or city the programming will be. For instance, says Apurva Purohit, CEO Radio City, “Mumbaiites worry a lot about their city, so a CSR initiative does very well there.” The ‘tuning into sensibilities’ thing, however, is not something all stations can do. It is easier in mature media markets such as Delhi or Mumbai where audiences are perceived as ‘evolved’.

The sum total — of all the programming on a radio station — has to fall within a format, says Purohit. If you Google for radio programming formats you will find dozens of them, such as the adult-plus contemporary or Contemporary Hit Radio format, among a dozen others. These have worked for thousands of stations globally.

Once the format is decided, the station’s brand personality or its positioning statement becomes clearer. For instance, “Mirchi is a sunshine brand. A corollary of Sunshine is that we are not anti-establishment. Generally speaking, we are a happy channel,” says Prashant Panday, CEO, Entertainment Networks India (Radio Mirchi).

This hyper-research oriented ‘work on the positioning’ approach is what some of the larger networks follow. And it works, helping to stand out and command better rates. Radio Mirchi is, arguably, the most profitable radio network in the country. 

“In today’s world, with technology easily available and transferable, product differentiation is not possible. The only differentiation between brands is in terms of their personalities,” says Panday. His point is that programming ideas may get stolen but identities can’t be replicated easily.
 

BRAND	POSITIONING	STATIONS	REVENUES*
Radio Mirchi	Sunshine, happy	32	422
Big FM	Hit oriented/local	45	N/A**
Radio City	Soft/mature/quiet	20	N/A
Mantra	Metroish	8	N/A
Radio One	Maximum choice	7	N/A
Red FM	Aggressive	46	N/A
Fever 104 FM	Popular	4	43
Dhamal 24	Local/mixed	10	N/A
*Rs  crore/FY 2010  **Not available

Chatter, chatter, chatter
“It is time to take radio to the next level,” says Keerthivasan. He is right. At Rs 800 crore in ad revenues, radio is the smallest part of the Rs  80,000 crore media and entertainment business in India. Depending on size and popularity, a radio network could be selling a 10 second ad spot for anywhere between Rs 50 and Rs 800. According to Radio Audience Measurement (RAM) data, more than 70 per cent of radio listening in India happens at home, the rest on the move.

Whichever way you look at it, radio remains a background medium that gets the least amount of time, attention and money from both listeners and advertisers. To improve those rates and get a larger share of revenues, radio has to move from being a background medium to one where audiences come by appointment.

Think of music channels. People flip through them but there is no ‘stickiness’. So advertisers buy them like commodities. To move to the next level most had to work at creating feature shows such as Roadies on MTV that brought dedicated, by appointment viewership and a premium on advertising.

That is where Ramayan and talk radio come in. Fever FM is testing half a dozen such ideas. The idea itself is not new.

Earlier, Radio City used to air Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi and Kahaani Ghar Ghar Ki in an audio format. Later, it experimented with horror and comedy.

“How well it (Ramayan kind  of concepts) will work is a function of how well it translates in an audio environment. Earlier experiments (such as the Radio City one) have failed,” says Arumugam. Meow, a station from the India Today Group that offered only talk targeted at women, just admitted defeat. It was recently rebranded as Oye FM and promises to be ‘Sabse Filmi’. Globally too, talk radio doesn’t make money, even in very mature markets such as the US.

Hope on the horizon
In music, greater variety could come in, in the next year or two.

A month back the Copyright Board pushed royalty rates down to 2 per cent of revenues. As costs go down, more experiments should happen. According to Panday, “When phase three (of private radio licensing) comes, if a company acquires a second or third channel in a city, it is likely to adopt more ‘niche’ programming formats.”

There is hope also from phase four, in which the industry hopes the government will open up more frequencies in the lucrative metro markets.

For now Rekha and Ramayan will have to suffice for variety.