Ask a casual music fan what they know about music television and their mind will probably go straight to MTV. Launched in 1981, it was very much a dominant brand in its market throughout the Eighties, Nineties and Noughties.
But those who have explored their TV guide a little more thoroughly will perhaps want to talk more about Box Plus Network, which re-branded from Box TV in February. It’s a 50/50 joint venture between Bauer and Channel 4 and has seven brands in total. 4 Music is licensed from Channel 4 - which is Box Plus Network’s biggest channel by far, thanks in no small part to its Freeview distribution - while Kiss, Kerrang!, Magic, Smash Hits and Heat are all licensed from Bauer. The Box is the network’s oldest channel and the one that it owns outright.
Last year, Box Plus Network claimed 44% of music TV viewing – which takes into account all of the channels on the Sky Electronic Programming Guide. More important, however, is how that figure has changed over the past couple of years. In 2012, Box Plus Network had a 38% share of viewing with its nearest rival MTV hovering around the 45% mark – meaning that the two companies have quickly switched places.
Box Plus Network MD Matt Rennie puts the progress down to an awareness of how young music fans are constantly changing the way they consume music videos – and taking cues from the world of online in order to keep up.
What were your aims at the start of 2014 and how much of that did you feel you’d achieved by the end of the year?
When I came in, in October 2013, it was a case of reviewing where we were and what we were doing as a business. We looked at it and very quickly thought that music TV has its challenges, it’s not on a massive growth curve, and we just needed to be really focused about how we dealt with that, how we talked to our audience and the kind of content we put out there for them. We really wanted to change the way that we delivered music TV, I had a feeling that music TV had gotten a bit boring and stale. You look at our competitors like YouTube and Vevo and look at the trends that consumers are following on those platforms – they’re interacting, commenting, curating. We started thinking about how we could bring those attributes to our TV channels and embrace them. So it was really about how we shifted the content output to make it more 2014 rather than 2005 music TV.
How did you do that?
That came through a bunch of different formats that we created and, looking back now in 2015, I think we were pretty successful. We integrated technology into our play out system so we could develop formats like Tweet To Beat. In the Noughties you had a Vs chart where they would have played a Beyoncé and a Pink video back-to-back. We can now start to overlay social data – so it’s the same kind of format but with a live social layer over the top, with people voting on which they like with hashtags and then that voting decides the last video so that the winner gets a pay off at the end of the show.
We also started crowd-sourcing content. We created formats such as YouNews and Video Crush, the latter of which allows viewers to review new music videos and then send in their own video review via YouTube or camera phone, which will appear on the show. It’s a video review show with our audience doing the reviews – the cameras may be a little bit grainy and look like they’ve come from YouTube, but for me that builds a bridge between our output and our audience, rather than having this fourth wall. I think it’s really important that we, as operators of TV channels, not only look at how we diversify our business and move on to new platforms, but also how we revolutionise the platform that we’re already on. We’ve still got a massive reach on our channels, that’s where our strength is, that’s where we can deliver mass promotion for the labels for their artists, so let’s make that more relevant.
Can you give us some of the top line figures that illustrate where Box Network Plus sits amongst its competition?
The key stats that we look at a lot are: share of music TV, which are those 30 or so channels that are in the Sky EPG [Electronic Programming Guide]. In terms of share, we’re just shy of 44% of all viewing. In 2012, we were around 38% and MTV was on something like 45%. In 2013, we pipped MTV for the first time, I think it was 40.9% versus 40.7%. Then last year we had a monster, securing 44% of the market. So over three years we’ve essentially swapped with MTV, and that’s despite them being on the first page of the Sky EPG, despite their global brand, business and so on. We’re over the moon. But that’s against the backdrop of the overall music TV market declining just shy of 8%.
You compare yourself to MTV but these days you must also have to compare yourself to the likes of YouTube and Vevo as well. How do you do that?
It’s difficult. In TV we have BARB [Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board] - it’s an accepted currency and I can get stats for every TV channel in the UK to see where we sit. You don’t have that looking at YouTube or Vevo. Clearly they’ve been on an incredible trajectory and you can see why they appeal to an audience who want to consume some music videos in a certain way. They do publish some numbers themselves. In 2013 Vevo said it had 2.4 billion UK video views. We did the same calculation ourselves and found that we did 3.3 billion. So we’re still quite far ahead – and that’s just us. If you add MTV and all the others on to that then music TV is still the biggest media outlet for music videos. They’re still growing, and I would expect it to be much more competitive this year.
In terms of reach, 79% of all 16-34s watched one of our channels last year. Looking at the total population, 68% watched one of our channels. What’s frustrating for me sometimes is that there’s a lot of focus, particularly from record labels, on digital and how they work with these new digital platforms. But we’re still a big platform talking to 68% of the population every year.
Is there a perception problem there then?
I think there is. Music TV has perhaps not innovated enough. The press usually focuses on what’s new.
Is there anything that you feel music companies could be doing to utilise music TV networks like yourself more?
I think there’s more we could do to help them understand our reach. Vevo and YouTube do a very good PR job, throwing out global numbers and maybe we should do a better job of [promoting] our own figures.
How closely do you work with the labels in 2015?
One of the things that music TV does brilliantly, compared to the likes of the Vevos and the YouTubes, is that we’re so much more than just a playlist of music videos – it’s about programmng, scheduling, production and the context that we put around the videos. We’ve got about 75 people that work here, with around a third of those focused on production – we make a huge amount of content for ourselves.
What are the challenges and goals for 2015?
Lots more of the same – lots more innovation. We really believe in trying to marry technology with creative, pitching some of our great creative minds in our production and marketing and being able to leverage technology against that.
Box is 21 years old and started off as TV that you control through premium rate [phone] lines.You used to call up, dial a number and that would select the video. We want to get back to that world, allowing our users to control our output through social voting. We also did a really interesting test at the end of last year with live music TV, which I think is a world first. We had live video mixing from our studio, with a DJ mixing videos live and a social layer delivering audience interaction. It was really interesting to see how our audience interacted with this live. So I think there’s more work to be done there.
We’re also not just a music network. 4Music, our biggest channel, slips into news and entertainment at peak time; shows like Keeping Up With The Kardashians. I think there’s more we can do there – we had some interesting formats last year, notably Rock The Look and Summer Scoop, which were lifestyle/music cross-overs. Rock The Look was around the fashion and style identities behind various pop stars. Summer Scoop was looking at the interests of pop stars; Example monster trucking, which he loved. It was about taking them out of the normal environment of talking about a new album.
We just want to do lots more of this, creating great content that our audience love and want to spend time watching.