Radio Mirchi in India
Posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 10:00am. #
Rounding off my round-the-world postings: my last stop was Radio Mirchi in India.
Commercial radio is fairly new in India – it started as an experiment in the mid nineties, and only recently became available, in 2006, in many parts of the continent. Radio Mirchi is a set of stations in most of the major cities – they all, thanks to an enlightened government and a really rather big country, broadcast on the same frequency of 98.3 FM.
Indian broadcast law forbids networking (which isn’t too much of a problem bearing in mind that India speaks many different languages) and also forbids news coverage on the radio as well, which is possibly more of an issue: Radio Mirchi is owned by the Times of India group (alongside Absolute Radio in the UK), which is surely well-placed to produce news output. Instead, Radio Mirchi covers Bollywood music, which it does extraordinarily well – reaching 44% of all FM radio listeners in Mumbai.
During my visit, I chatted to the presenter of the Sunset Samosa evening show, Suren – a young guy who was always on-air, even when in the office. He mentioned that the main way his audience get in touch with him was by SMS text message. He said that the amount of texts he received was quite variable – sometimes a trickle, sometimes he had loads and loads. The difference? When he asked an easy question, he got lots of texts – when he asked the audience to work a bit harder, he got far less. It’s the same story everywhere, and nice to hear Suren had spotted it too.
Later, I’d returned to the hotel, had some food, and was doing some work when I got a text: the whole station had decided that tonight was a party night, and had gone to the Hawaiian Shack, a nightclub in the Bandra area of the city. A quick taxi later, and I’d joined them – upstairs in the Bollywood floor, rather than downstairs in the comfortable eighties rock floor. I’d discovered another station that clearly worked hard and played hard.
India’s a fascinating place: the desktop PC is used far less than Europe; and the mobile phone is the main way of communicating. FM radio on mobiles will really change the way Indians enjoy radio; and Mirchi continues to try new things on mobile phones – I’d first met Mirchi when they were experimenting with Nokia’s Visual Radio.
As Google are now saying, the future is mobile – and for Radio Mirchi, that advice is especially prescient. It’s well worth watching what they do in India; because they could well leapfrog the old-fashioned, desktop internet as they quickly embrace the power of the mobile phone.
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If you’ve enjoyed this series, I’m currently presenting my findings in a multimedia presentation (so far, to Global Radio, the Radio Academy, and the Future of News Group). If I can fit it in, I’d love to come to you, too; there’s stuff that we can all learn from, I think. Get in touch.
