History of Music Channels

History of Music Channels

Kerrang was first published as a magazine on the 6^th June 1981 and was edited by Geoff Barton who was also one of the founders of Sounds newspaper which focused on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal as it was on the rise along with other hard. As the years developed Kerrang became an interest to many youths and started to include music genres such as punk rock, pop punk, nu metal, heavy metal and drum and bass. It became so increasingly popular that in the spring of 2001 it was launched as Kerrang TV and is owned by Box television. It is relevant to the magazines but has expanded so much more. All of its programme content is music videos and the majority of the schedule is text song requests from viewers and the occasional countdown of rocks finest music videos with band specials. Artists featured on this particular channel include hundreds of new and old artists such as Tenacious D, Paramore, Lost Prophets, You Me at Six, The Blackout and so many more. They have recently started playing unsigned acts which are often accepted by mainstream. The station never fails to play requested videos however it sometimes takes a while to play each one. The stations target audience is mainly aimed around 14 year olds and onwards but mainly older teenagers as they can relate to the music and styles of Kerrang. The majority of the videos are heavily censored and do their best to remove violence, references to god and religion, drugs and bad language by dubbing out or blurring the image. Kerrang’s sister channels (these are channels that are linked with each other) include Channel 4, Film 4, E4, More 4, 4Music, Kiss, Magic, Q, Smash Hits and The Box. The channel also promotes and advertises upcoming Kerrang tours and festivals such as Download which if effective marketing for them. Their logo originated from Kerrang Magazine and decided to carry it on for the music channels to make it recognizable to people.

KISS television was first launched on 26^th June 1998 and is also owned by Box Television. This channel is available on Sky and Virgin Media. The structure and the playlist consist of mainstream hip hop, dance and R&B music. They always show the latest chart music and videos with very few other genres of music. They originally came up with the name ‘KISS’ from the rock band which was known to be ironic as they do not play this music.

It is based in the location of London and follows in the footsteps of KISS radio (KISS 100) which once started as a pirate radio station in London in 1985. They celebrated their 20^th anniversary of its official launch in 2005. The television channel has many other sister channels and they are the same as Kerrang TV’s and the majority are owned by The Box. The original owner of KISS was a man called Guy Wingate who was the co-creator of KISS 100 back when it was a pirate station. The channels started up by being shown an hour an evening on the Mirror Group’s L!VE TV cable circuit and then eventually moved its way up to satellite still with a similar time slot. The idea was first proposed in 1993 and their target audience was based to be aimed around teenage both male and female from 14 – 19 or above. KISS became the first “Masthead” TV project in the UK and within a year of the launch of this music channel, it was already beating MTV and taking over time slots giving them a status of having the best dance music scene in the UK. The channels presenters included big named DJ’S such as BBC Radio 1’s Judge Jules. As time went by, KISS had attracted major sponsorship from Blue Chip (investors) brands such as Levi’s, Sony consumer products and The Guardian Newspaper.