MUMBAI: Radio One, a joint venture of Next Media Works and BBC worldwide, is fighting tough to create differentiated content and stand apart from the herd.
Besides hindi play in Bangalore and international music in Mumbai and Delhi, Radio One has now turned 100 % retro hindi station in Kolkata. It is the only radio station in the city to give listeners pure hindi classics all throughout the day.
94.3 Radio One national programming head Anil Machado said, ‘It is about time, format radio replaces generic radio in the Kolkata market. The city’s rich sense of heritage and the fact that some of the best hindi music has roots in Kolkata helped us reach this decision to be different and pure. The station had conducted a research wherein it emerged that most listeners in Kolkata were exposed to a ‘mixture of too many kinds of music’ which resulted in all radio stations sounding the same. Also listeners complained that there was no ‘maturity /classyness in spoken content’. So the change addresses these problems. Listeners also complained of too much jock talk in all stations between the 12 noon to 4pm time band resulting in a sharp drop of average number of songs per hour in that band’
On the change, 94.3 Radio One MD Vineet Singh Hukmani said, “As we have maintained, we will be always ‘away from the herd’ and yet reach a sizeable audience in every city we play in. Kolkata is a market where there is tremendous appreciation of the ‘heritage of hindi retro’ both in mature educated listeners and discerning advertisers looking to reach a quality conscious audience. From the initial response we are confident that this will help our equity grow within the right audience. We have never been interested only in reach. We have always been interested in giving our advertisers the impact they need within a sizeable but well profiled audience. This change will bring us very close to almost two million listeners in Kolkata and this market being a high TSL market will help us build tremendous loyalty.”