On 24 April, Indian based International Music Channel 9XO completed two years in the music business by providing music lovers with International songs that are trending and making news. Shouldering the responsibility of providing back to back music along with various on-ground and on-air properties; and other activities has helped the channel so far to grow in terms of viewers and popularity.

On social networking sites, 9XO has more than 45,000 followers on Twitter and more than two lakh likes on Facebook. To celebrate its second anniversary it held an engaging activity alongside the usually activity.

In this week of Musical Rendezvous, 9XO Channel Head Luke Kenny presents the journey of the channel in a jiffy.

Two years and still going

It is awesome to have a channel for two years and running. It is an achievement for my team, my company and me. To celebrate our two years, we created a funky ‘O’ promo where we picked up all the O’s from various music videos. That is 9XO’s style of celebrating its two years. This was followed by a series of activity on Twitter and Facebook. So we are getting feedback from our online fans and are offering them gifts too. The celebration took place across our platforms.

Social Networking sites

From day one, we knew that our audience would be online and television is the medium of getting them to interact with us. Social media gives us an idea of most watched and liked tracks. It helps understand what is trending and what is falling off trends. We empanelled college kids from four –five metros when we were constructing our channel to get direct feedback about the channel. We have received a good number of Twitter followers. Twitter is so populated with content and that is where we stand out as we provide content that is essential.

On-ground activities

We have done a lot of on-ground events like partnering with a number of college events and festivals. We also partnered with Sunburn for Armin van Buuren and Deadmau5. The other events we partnered with are ‘Holi Reloaded’, Holi party in Bangalore@ Pebbles, The Great Indian Holi Fest, Pune and Lucid Space – 5 international artist @ big bang bar. Audiences who come through the event also experience the channel and push their feedback to our social networking site.

Today, our aim is to have a more integrated on-ground experience. In the first year, we tested the water and reached-out to people. The second year was very fruitful as it bought us results. On the back of the results, we can further build our channel and also understand the kind of credibility 9XO has in the market and among viewers.

Tweetdown, Omegrown and BYOB

We get more responses on Twitter, and broadcast the tweets during the show. It has been our barometer on deciding what our listeners like and what they are listening to. They talk about songs that are not part of any list, but it makes it to our channel. We are constantly doing things based on the feedback and Tweetdown is doing very well.

Apart from Tweetdown, Omegrown is also doing well and is encouraging for artistes. We ask them to send across their videos, which gets featured on our channel. These are two properties that are doing very well.

Then we have the dance property BYOB which has helped us to partner with many promoters as they consider this property a solid block in the EDM space. Last year, we partnered with the first Indian resident DJ at the Ministry of Sounds- Aaryan Gala. He released his video and promoted it across the country with us. There is no channel that has done so much for dance music.

The relation that we have built is instrumental in developing and strengthening our mission forward.

Competition

Every new channel that comes up in this space has distinctive content. With regards to us we always focussed on International content that is a hit and trending. We do not have any blocks like rock or retro which is a replicate model of other channels. We are not a completely Indies channel like MTV Indies. Whether it is Vh1, MTV Indies or 9XO, we are all distinct in our content. We are alternative options to each other’s content. Here no one is replicating the other’s model. Everybody has their own growth path.

Hurdle

Unfortunately, the only thing for 9XO is the huge technical hurdle; we are not able to get upon the biggest distribution platform till date. That is something our distribution team is also working towards. Hopefully, things are positive and then it will be more fun.

Target for 2014

We will target a lot of music related content, not music videos. There is lot of content that is produced and we are talking to content owners now. There will be refreshed and reshuffled content to the channel. This will be traditional, yet not home grown content.