It was celebration time for 94.3 Radio One Bangalore’s definitive Bollywood Station as it completed 6 years. Celebrations this year kicked off with a groovy drum jam with all the invitees, symbolic of 94.3 Radio One’s music proposition of “maximum music, maximum choice” and was led by none other than Roberto Narain.
Apart from the groovy music and the rocking dance performances, the presence of Radio One’s most popular radio jockeys (RJ’s) RJ Pijosh, RJ Prithvi and RJ Rakesh turned the atmosphere more lively and exhilarating.
Capturing 94.3 Radio One’s journey, Shyju Varkey, Station Head-Bangalore and National Marketing Head- Radio One says:
The year was 2007. There were 7 radio stations in Bangalore, as against the solitary one just a year before. The reach of the vernacular format had just been smelt and everyone was falling off, like lemmings off a cliff, for a share in the Sandalwood music pie.
Every station that launched was going Kannada. Earlier-established players were switching formats to Kannada. Considering that we were the first ones to start playing Kannada, in mid 2006, we watched first with smugness that our stand was vindicated, and then with mortification as we realized that there were far too many players for this to make financial sense to everyone. We’d tried every trick in the book – including getting Amitabh Bachchan to speak in Kannada, endorsing Radio One.
It was then that we re-visited our raison d’être - to occupy ‘empty spaces’ and provide listeners a product away from the herd, while offering advertisers a clearly profiled audience. We moved right into the empty Bollywood space and went about our business. It wasn’t as obvious or as easy as it sounds in retrospect, but there was some bloodshed along the way. Change isn’t easy to digest, but I’m glad we bit the bullet when we did.
In all the dust that got kicked by all the format changes, we got remembered not as being the sole Bollywood station, but as the station that housed the quirky Chamarajpet Charles, the flamboyant Rajni Saar and the rambling Ulfat Sultan.
While we grew steadily in popularity, it wasn’t well into 2009 that Radio One exploded into the collective consciousness of the city. We were steadily laying the ground for Bollywood by kicking off Desi Grooves, the city’s first weekly Bollywood party, calling over obscure production houses to launch their films in Bangalore, and making other such overtures.
The real Bollywood came calling presently. What started with a trickle with movies like Via Darjeeling and Chak De India became a deluge with Kaminey, 3 idiots, Raaz, Jail, Karthik Calling Karthik, New York, Ragini MMS and a host of others. Neil Nithin Mukesh playing DJ at a Radio One party, Vinay Pathak dancing on the bar counter, Priyanka Chopra slickly evading 3 jam-packed flights of stairs when she got in and out of our studios, Ekta Kapoor conceiving her threesome theme parties to launch Ragini MMS while brainstorming with us, Aamir breaking through his security cordon to get his pictures clicked by a bunch of children, Radio one just ended up being the place where the stars loved to hang out.
While we have never played the listener-numbers game in Bangalore, Radio One has undoubtedly seen as being at the forefront of the radio movement in the city, the leader by default. Looking back, all it took was some perceptiveness and more than just some rigour.
Once we decided that we would not be part of the herd, we invested heavily in delivering a product that would stand as far apart from the rest, keeping the listener at the core of everything we did. We opened out the doors of our studios to them, we let them choose their music for us, we celebrated their birthdays with them, we celebrated ours with them. We brought down Bollywood stars for them, got listeners to meet them, chat with them, touch them.
6 years on, and we can pat ourselves on the back for making Bollywood sexy in Bangalore. When Vijay Raghavendra, a big Sandalwood star came to our studios last month to play our his choice of Bollywood hits, we’d come a full circle.
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