In 2020, Fever FM launched its flagship umbrella event – Bounce Back Bharat Fest, marking the largest-ever digital activation in the history of radio
In 2021, Fever FM introduced two more Digital IPs – The Ayurveda Project and Yoga Bootcamp.
“Radio in India has been in the state of transition for last 5 years. The pandemic’s impact on the industry necessitated speeding it up further. Fever Network, being a metro-dominant player, felt the impact deeper and harder. We re-structured ourselves, bumped up our digital presence and expanded our digital content across platforms. We reinvented ourselves. There are no programming heads now; we have content heads. On the business side, we have become a solutions-through-content organisation. We will continue to prioritise innovation and offering out-of-the-box solutions to add value for our clients. This year is going to be a defining year for radio’s re-emergence as a medium of choice for discerning brands”, Neeraj Saraswat, Chief Revenue Officer, Fever Network.
EMERGING TRENDS IN RADIO AND DIGITAL
Fever FM has pioneered its partnerships with HT Media’s other properties to bring radio, print, and digital come together and operate in cohesion to provide significant value to brand partnerships. Some of the emerging trends seen at Fever FM include:
An increase in digital strategies to better suit the changing landscape by developing and curating web-radio platforms.
Offering advertisers more value-added propositions like digital integrated solutions along with the Fixed Commercial Time
Creating new shows with RJs on different genres like humour, music, sparkler, storytelling, sports, travel, etc.
Launch of Fever Originals which is an attempt to foray into the branded content segment
Leveraging the wider social media reach of RJs as brand influencers
The Fever Network also ventured into many new businesses last year but one of the most notable of those is its foray into its flagship music label – Fab Music Beats. Since then, many Fever initiatives have been launched. The launch of Fab Music Beats as an independent label to promote indie artists, Punjabi music and street artists. Anshul Riaji, was launched as a busking artist from Delhi, under Fever’s #Street2Studio project—an initiative to promote talented, economically challenged street artists
Fever also collaborated with artist discovery platforms—Songdew and Skillbox—to further its objective of promoting independent music
Fever’s attempts to democratise audio content has received love from its audience. Its latest release—Carrera by Deep Money—crossed a whopping 3.5 million+ views on YouTube.
THE RISE OF REGIONAL
A report by FICCI-EY (Media & Entertainment) estimated that by 2025, about 50 per cent of the time spent on OTT platforms will be to consume content from India’s regional languages. Regional content is expected to become mainstream soon and to keep up with this demand, the Fever Network is experimenting with music and content from South-Indian languages, creating a robust vernacular line-up via localisation of content.
Recently, there has also been an emergence of the podcast culture in India. HT Smartcast, HT Media’s podcast platform, happens to be the biggest podcast library in the country with trending content creators across various genres like News, Business, and Culture.
