Red FM brings Kerala to rest of India with South Side Story

Under its initiative Red Indies, the channel also plans to launch its own streaming services, supporting Indie music before the end of this year. Nisha Narayanan, COO and Director, Red FM, in an interaction with BestMediaInfo.com, shared what all the new initiatives would be coming from the station’s end, and why the journey of south began with Kerala.

Narayanan feels the economy or the music industry is moving from being Bollywood-driven to a more artistic economy. So discovering artists across the country has become crucial for the channel.

Nisha Narayanan

“Under the Red Indies banner, we have multiple things that we will be constantly doing throughout the year, in our support to independent music. So, the objective of Red Indies is to give a mass medium platform to indie artists on one hand, and to give listeners a choice of discovery beyond Bollywood music. We would want to focus a lot more on regional music, making it more participatory. The intent is to kind of get people to recommend artists. So, there is enough listener engagement as well. We are planning to launch our streaming services focusing on indie music very soon in this year,” she said.

Under the Red Indie series, the channel has started playing independent music across the network. It has already launched ‘Indie Hain Hum’, a 12-episode series with Darshan Rawal, on digital platforms. Like the Yellow Taxi music festival for pop music, which Red FM had earlier launched, South Side Story aims to take south India to the rest of India. By bringing two popular regional Indie bands, Agam and Thaikuddam Bridge, the festival will showcase the best of Carnatic progressive rock, pop and electronic music.

She said the event schedule coincided with the festival of Onam, which gave the channel the idea to choose Kerala to start with. The event will take place in Mumbai on September 1 at Richardson and Cruddas and on September 7 in New Delhi at Zorba.

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