Exclusive | MTV Unplugged 2; pure and raw, no electrics: Aditya Swamy

After the success of the first season, MTV is back with ‘MTV UNPLUGGED’ – Season 2 in quite a different way which will surely enthrall the audience and tease their musical spirits. Season 2 will take the audience through the musical journey of some renowned singers. For the very first time on world television, the God of Music himself, Oscar winner A.R.Rahman will present a live unplugged performance!

 

Adgully spoke to Aditya Swamy – EVP and Business Head – MTV India to know more about the season 2 and the strategic plans of MTV India going further.

 

Speaking about the show, Swamy said, “The theme for this season on Unplugged is Mega Artists, Mega Hits. Also, this time we are taking the show beyond MTV into Colors, radio, mobile, mtvindia.com and several music sharing sites in addition to our social platforms. There would be 14 live shows that will give an unbelievable musical experience.”

 

This time the show seems to rope in some of the most high profiled singers on board. So telling us about how difficult or easy was it to put all that together, Swamy said, “The objective of all the music shows that we do is to give the audience a variety of music that is present in our country. With Unplugged the idea is to give every genre from Bollywood to soft, unpopular, popular and all the varied genres we have in this country. That is the reason the audience will see singers like A.R Rehman and Sunidhi Chauhan and on the other side we have amazing singers like Lucky Ali and Kailasa.” Swamy believes that it’s not the matter of being easy or difficult, it’s a give and take process: you choose the right talent and right platform and the ball is in your court and MTV has always been known for doing that!

 

Undoubtedly all this would surely give a flavor of what our country has and is rich in. He says, “The various kinds of musical properties that we have built over the years have always attracted musicians from across the world.” The show will also be telecasted on, ‘Colors’, ‘Colors HD’ and will simulcast on the radio station ‘Fever’.  

 

Commenting on this journey of putting the show across various more platforms and simulcast it on radio, Swamy said, “The thought came up during our last season of Unplugged as the demands came of putting this pure form of music on some more platforms so that it would reach out to masses and so this time we implemented that thought with a key objective to reach out to more and more people to experience this form of music.”

 

With a clear thought of not just creating awareness but creating a reach, the channel will be seen promoting the content across different platforms from music sharing sites such as Napster, i-tunes, amazon, nokia ovi etc, and as like always, to the social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter etc. The channel has planned 14 concerts across cities such as Pune, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Hyderabad etc.  He says, “The core of the marketing goal would be to make more and those people enjoy unplugged music that are not aware off and that is how we will create a footprint of our show.”

 

Swamy believes that not only music but everything has evolved may it be movies, acts or anything else. Audience today is all set for all sort of experimental kind of content. Apart from this, Swamy told us that they are adopting newer and newer avenues for distribution as well.

 

Other artists who are part of this season are –Kailasa, the beacon of independent music in India, the multi-talented and mellifluous -Sunidhi Chauhan, the silken voice of Shafqat Amanat Ali, the soulful Lucky Ali, Contemporary, western classical singer– Ash King, Fusion band–Agnee and India's prominent rock band- Indus Creed. These amazing artists form a musical line-up of an amazing journey that is about to get unfold. Steering them all in one direction will be the music producer of season 1, the critically acclaimed producer and drummer par excellence Ranjit Barot, who dons the role of producer on Royal Stag Mega Music ‘MTV UNPLUGGED’ season 2.

 

With such great thoughts and content, the show surely seems promising and set to rock the floor! | By Aanchal Kohli [aanchal(at)adgully.com]