You might think Jersey Shore, Teen Mom and their siblings are the future of the “Music TV” Network. Often times we wonder where music videos fit into the MTV picture in a world of YouTube, Vevo and more. You’ll definitely see the top pop-sensations each year at the VMAs, but when you truly think about where the top innovations in the music world are coming from — you don’t always think MTV.
Take an extremely passionate, 16-year MTV employee, whose love for MTV, David Bowie and American culture brought him from India and Dubai to the Big Apple years ago, and you have MTV Iggy, the new global music brand and incubator MTV has cultivated under the leadership of now-35-year-old Nusrat Durrani, SVP and GM of MTV World.
The social media impact Iggy’s had since the launch on September 26 has been quite good: Facebook updates have garnered over 4.5 million post views; Facebook fan interactions and feedback have more than doubled, with an increase of over 136%; MTV Iggy’s Facebook and Twitter accounts have doubled and tripled in fans, with 114% and 235% increases, respectively; the social media platforms have a truly global following with top Facebook fan countries being from: USA, Mexico, India, Venezuela and Pakistan.
Described as a “multi-platform music brand connecting America with global artists and pop culture phenomena,” MTV Iggy recently announced that it crowd Korean pop sensation 2NE1 as The Best New Band in the World 2011 after a six-week “social media-intensive” search.
We talked to Nusrat Durrani about the new MTV brand and its social media-driven approach.
Lost Remote: How did you get started curating the world’s music with Iggy?
Nusrat Durrani: We spent months and months, receiving pitches from labels, researching the web. We tested the concept out last year, we thought we sparked a real set of passion, decided this year to go and do it in a comprehensive manner. We had participation from 169 countries around the world. The fans caught fire on social media, the fans organized themselves. We made a list of 2,000 bands. We parsed, deliberated and brought it down, from 500 to 10 acts that were really ripe, then we created content around those ten acts. On September 26th we invited the world to vote.
LR: What was the criteria?
ND: The band should be relatively known and not featured on a MTV platform, but high quality. They needed to be ready to meet the world. Those were the filters.
ND: The band itself, is a girl group, pop music band, in the truest, coolest sense of the word. They’re slick, amazing dancers, sing well, they have a strong sense of style. Beyond all of that they have attitude. They’re taking the best of Western Pop music and making it their own. They’re so incredibly cool.
The Korean Pop Music industry is mature. They spend years in training before they put out their first song. They apply rigor to their pop music that they should apply. There’s too much music that’s not deliberated.
LR: How did their fans used social media?
ND: Their fans are fanatical. If you follow the Twitter feeds, Facebook engagement, even on our site. It’s been liked 41,000 times, been tweeted 61,000 times. They’re also very popular in Latin America, not because there are Koreans, because they are universal.
LR: What’s next with Iggy?
ND: There will be a Times Square performance on December 12th. We will bring that band [2NE1) to the heartland for a big global concert. It will be a multiplatform event, in two or three venues, concert streamed online. One of the MTV channels will carry it.
LR: What’s your background and experience with MTV?
ND: I’ve been at MTV for 16 years. I grew up in India listening to Rock N’ Roll from the west from many different countries – I grew up 10,000 miles away, with a well developed romantic image of America to it’s music. I have an MBA, management background, so I moved to Dubai to work for Honda in the UE. There was no MTV in India. I was a music junkie.
In 1993 I watched MTV for the first time in Dubai. I saw David Bowie and said I have to work for this company. I went the very old school way. I went and did old school research on the company, it’s people. I then got on a plane, and asked for a job. It was like trying to date a girl initially not interested in you. We didn’t connect initially but I knew I could take her places.
LR: Do you think this is the future of music and MTV?
ND: I was hired in 1995 as an intern and then helped launch MTV.com. The web was what global pop music is now, strange. What I’m doing now is very reminiscent from when I first joined MTV, at the time we were furthering the idea of the web, that we should be participating in the web much more.
Guess what? It did become the future. Now, what we’re doing with global pop music – is the future, there’s nothing we’re inventing, we’re holding a mirror and opening the gates. This is going to happen anyway. We’re being a catalyst. It’s a perfect storm. There’s more immigration, more travel, cultural political events, economy, it’s brewing.
If we as Americans want to do business with China, Brazil, Russia, we owe it to those cultures to bring their stuff back. What’s a better way of connecting with the world than through music.
LR: How do you use social personally?
ND: On my Facebook page, people post stuff all the time. Even in the past 24 hours. It’s constantly enabling discovery of new music for me.