How challenging is it to run a music channel in a stagnant revenue environment?
The highest revenue potential for a music channel in India under the current environment is Rs 240 million a year. MTV should be making more, but even for them the growth is limited. Since the revenues aren’t big, it is necessary to be more accurate in what you want to do. In movie channels if you are big, you don’t have to be perfectly right. For music channels, you can run the risk of diluting the brand. MTV could afford to try out soaps because it doesn’t have strong competition. But it didn’t work for the business or the brand. These kind of tempting experiments are not advisable because it shows that you don’t understand the pulse of the business as you can’t make music channel audiences sit for half-an-hour. MTV thought it could leap in terms of revenues but sadly failed. If you have to scale up revenues, you have to extend other lines of business related to the brand like licensing and merchandising.
