MUMBAI: The folks at T-Series are celebrating and how. The reason: the music label’s Youtube channel emerged as the No 1 music channel in the world for the calendar year 2016 with 7.2 billion video views. And the icing on the cake was the 193 per cent rise in its views at 733,997,909 in December 2016 alone.

T-Series representatives are happy about this development. Says T-Series digital president Neeraj Kalyan who has been overseeing its channels since their launch in January 2011: “We are really ecstatic with the accolades. It’s result of years of hard work and dedication of the entire team.”

He further added that factors that have helped the channel get to the top of YouTube chart are 3Cs - consistency in content quality, continuous content curation and consumer engagement.

Apart from the 3Cs the singles with both new and established artists too maintained the momentum for T-Series. “We will continue to carry on this initiative to release independent music in the future as well.” When asked about the average watch time he stated, “Our watch time is slightly higher than the industry average and is growing consistently.”

Honey Singh, Arijit Singh, Badshah, Palak Muchhal and Kanika Kapoor are the ones to have bagged 100 million+ views on YouTube for T-Series. However, Kalyan stated that there is no fixed pattern when it comes to the life cycle of the music video. “It all depends upon content quality, content curation, and marketing,” added he.

Marketing plays an important role in taking the product to the consumers and T-Series is leaving no stone unturned here. “In addition to YouTube and social media, we have been extensively pushing content promotion through television, radio and on-ground promotional gigs for artists.”

Subscription is the base of a YouTube channel and it got firmer for T-Series with the first million subscribers. “The first million subscribers took us a lot of time as we were still learning the fine print of YouTube ecosystem. The next millions were really exponential and had a ripple effect in numbers going north. We have more than 15 million on our main T-Series channel and 22 million + subscribers on the entire network of multiple genre channels,” explained Kalyan.

T-Series also has a movieplex service on its Youtube MCN. Kalyan says it has yet to get traction as T-VOD services have yet to take off substantially in any part of the world. “However, SVOD services are seeing a lot of traction and will continue to grow to offer a wider choice to the consumer in a very cost effective manner.”

One would expect a huge team behind these eye-popping numbers, but the T-Series digital team has a total of 38 on its rolls and this also includes the T-Series backend data team. The team is currently busy maintaining the numbers for being on the top is full of responsibilities and challenges according to Kalyan: “While the landmark achievement (first by any Indian Label) is a true reward for our hard work and dedication, it also brings in a lot of responsibility and pressure to maintain that position globally. We are fully geared up to meet the challenges ahead and excel in our endeavour to meet the expectations of our discerning audience worldwide.”

On the fall of CPM rates on YouTube, the digital expert stated, “There is a lot of inventory available on YouTube primarily because 65-70 per cent of the views are coming from mobile devices and YouTube ecosystem offers a limited choice of ad formats to the advertiser on mobile due to various tech bottlenecks. I am sure Google would be working hard to bridge the gaps and we hope to see CPMs increase in the near future.”

There were other Indian labels and properties which made it to the top music channels list on YouTube. Among them: Chu Chu TV (3.4bn), Zee Music Company (1.45 billion views between July and December) and Sony Music (710 million views between October and December).

The streaming service added a data-friendly app and more regional language support for India, which probably is resulting in a spike in views for the Indian channels, says tubefilter.

2017 will be a big year for the music label with 40 big budget film music releases. 11 home productions films and an equally good number of singles in Hindi and Punjabi that according to Kalyan will be the icing on the cake for the music fans.

Tubefilter has dared to predict in its report that T-Series is on course to become the first music channel to generate a billion views in a month in 2017.

That will surely make Bhushan Kumar and Neeraj Kalyan smile even more.