India is enamoured with the concept of love. A youth insight study was conducted with age group of 15-25 where we found that 25% of Indians don’t mind trying same-sex relationships and 71% of India supports Gay/ queer friends.
Suggesting that India is more accepting of the LGBTQIA+ community, yet there is very little done within the music community to give them a platform to showcase their talent or be accepting of such that they can make a career out of it.
We are India’s No.1 Contemporary Hindi Music channel and with that title comes responsibility, a responsibility to lead the conversation and be the agents of change.
We wanted to bring a change in society and we took a bold step for the same. Our objective was to create a campaign that would be a symbol of evolution in Indian music, to give India its first unlabeled love duet album written and composed by artists, musicians from the LGBTQIA+ community who came together to celebrate love and also bring forth a representation of the community in music.
But, most importantly it was a step towards normalizing conversation on same-gender love – to normalize the visual of love beyond gender. MTV Beats aimed to give to these artists a platform as we always have, to bolster new and upcoming talent
When we say we are contemporary, we mean it! This reflects in not just the music we play but also the way we think. We believe in evolving constantly to strengthen our bond with the viewers.
The inspiration for the look and feel of the entire campaign is taken from old school movie posters & on-screen romance which was earlier depicted by two flowers embracing each other. The flowers therefore signify a girl and boy but we disrupted this visual by showcasing them as same-gender love stories.
We collaborated with some of the best artists from the community like Sushant Divgikar, Rushik Thakkar, Shubhangi, Prachi, Ma Faiza and Rtunjya. Along with this, Kitty su, One of the biggest nightclubs in Mumbai came ahead to partner with us.
We along with these artists came forward to produce songs that showcased their definition of love, for different gender relationships.
First song – Jashn-E-Bahar (Gay – Sushant)
Second song – Teri meri baatein (Non Binary – Ma Faiza, Rushik)
Third song – Ishq kar le tu (Hai toh pyar hi) (Lesbian – Shubhangi, Prachi)
We captured the entire process of bringing out these love duets and made sure that the audience doesn’t miss out on any behind the scenes fun. We also got our artists to answer a few love questions, giving these songs an even more personal touch. Post the song release we encouraged our audience to create their own rendition of the love duet by using the rainbow mic filter where we got sixty three thousand impressions alone.
Bollywood too joined the bandwagon as we collaborated with Nikhita Gandhi, (The voice behind bollywood blockbusters like Raabta, Qafirana, etc) and she launched her song Khud Ko hi Paa ke as a part of the Love Duet album. Our album was now playing on more than 10 major audio platforms and was getting love from the entire country.
Our American counterpart, Viacom CBS took the campaign further to a global level and our campaign was shared by international influencers like Prince Of Rajpipla – the first ever gay prince, Nikhil Chinapa, Divya Aggarwal, Sandeep Anand, Prosit Roy, Puja Banerjee, Sujoy Chatterjee, Sanket Sawant – The Gentlemen Gaga etc and we garnered PR impressions of 286.2 Mn worth 0.4 Mn at zero cost.
We took a step ahead to make smaller versions of existing bollywood songs, gender neutral through our love audio calls which was thoroughly enjoyed by our audience.
Our campaign garnered a total reach of 30 MN, with total views of 3MN and an engagement of 2.8 MN with an engagement rate of 8.91%. We also made PR Impressions worth the reach of 286.2 MN with an approximate value of 0.4MN USD at zero cost. We made sure that the world was in sync with the beats of #LoveDuet and conveyed the message that ‘Jab pyaar kiya toh darna kya’
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