Anyone who enjoys music irrespective of genres has at some point or the other considered subscribing to worldspace radio. When they launched in Bangalore even FM Radio was unknown, as it was only limited to the 4 metros, giving Worldspace the added edge that first movers have. I've always been wowed by the product and have had the subscription for over a year, didnt renew it coz i hardly spent time at home anymore.(Workaholic that i always have been). It's sad that they decided to close operations in India despite having about 4.5lakh subscribers paying them Rs.1800 every six months. The economic times also reported that India accounted for over 90% of worldspace's global revenues. (Blame that on the poor broadband penetration in India?) I'm shocked at the fact that they couldnt survive despite such positive numbers. I am also shocked at their clear lack of efforts to add products to their portfolio, afterall they had a captive audience with clarity on one thing the audience loved and connected them all, music. As a marketer, thats almost always the biggest challenge and something we try to direct efforts towards, what more can i feed my audience with. (http://www.worldspace.com/index_wsmsg.html)
One of my first assignments while working with an events and BTL company as a part timer, early in my career was for worldspace. I'm proud to say that it was on my suggestion to the then worldspace management in Bangalore that the concept of 'listening stations' came into being for them. These were futuristic looking consoles where a worldspace receiver was docked with a high quality set of head phones for listeners to come and 'experience' the music for themselves. This was my first brush with the concept of 'experiential marketing'. The client was so overwhelmed by the idea that they recommended we handle their BTL across India. It took many heated arguments for me to convince my boss that we werent equipped to handle it and had to politely refuse. All India BTL was improbable for a 3 member outfit that we were those days and we were better off focusing on what we had at hand and could handle. We set up these stations at places we thought were a connect with worldspace's audience, Planet M, Music World, Movie theatres (bangalore didnt have multiplexes those days), Pubs with a focus on playing a particular genre of music, coffee shops, premium gyms / healthclubs,etc,. We even got a few fine dining restaurants to play worldspace satellite radio. We recommended to worldspace to give away receivers to key touch points for free and in exchange arranged for marketing collateral to be distributed at that touch point. We had some of them letting us hang danglers, some shared hand-outs along with a copy of the customers bills. All in all, in less than a month of working together, we were crucial components of worldspace's marketing initiatives.
Personally, I didnt have too much respect for their team who i thought was either getting stuck in executing top management decisions or were under too much pressure to generate numbers. This clearly made them stop thinking, hence a teenager was giving them ideas to bowl them over and i'm sure one or two of them did well on their career chart for that year. Thats how the business goes.
One of their best moves in the Indian market was to introduce in excess of 30 channels streaming awesome music 24 hours a day, every day of the week. They even managed to bring down the cost of receivers and brought in basic variants through the years. The biggest opportunity they missed out on was that of having worldspace radios work in your car / automobiles.
Look at this simple calculation, 4,50,000 subscribers x Rs. 1800(6months) = Rs.81,00,00,000 which meant that in year they got the Indian market to cough up 162 crores for content, at a time when all of us are talking about content being free. All this without concentrated efforts to target niches segments individually. Standardised, one product fits all kinda approach.
What worries me most is the timing of this. We currently have media houses attempting to get the consumer to pay for 'quality' content and almost always subscription based payments are made in advance, will this now have the consumer vary of such purchases under the pretext of Caveat Emptor? More importantly, how will publishers cope with the inhibition? Well, only time will tell.
