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"FM radio as a category has come to stay," says Parigi, CEO of Entertainment Network India Ltd, which runs the station. "Today if you look at the (advertising) template of a CEO, media planner, brand owner, you'll find a column for print, a column for television and a column for radio."

The reason for his optimism is the reach of radio. Parigi says Radio Mirchi currently has about 18 million daily listeners across 10 radio stations and will have an addressable population of 150 million when it unveils the 22 stations it has planned.

"No medium, including the print medium, gives you on a daily basis this kind of target," he says.

Parigi would eventually like to see every second or third Indian listen to radio. He believes radio can play a crucial role in providing entertainment, and eventually, news as well, in most Indian cities and towns facing energy shortages.

"Lots of towns in India, including places like Kanpur, Delhi and Lucknow, are energy-starved," he says. "All you need is a transistor with a pencil battery and you switch it on. So you can imagine the kind of reach radio has in energy-starved areas or during power shutdowns."

"And this happens in our big towns for four to six hours. Imagine if you had news and current affairs, how dependent would people be on radio?" he adds.

Currently, the biggest advertisers on Radio Mirchi are banking and insurance, entertainment (TV shows are being promoted on radio), petroleum, automotive and FMCGs. What Parigi expects to see happening in the near-term is a split between national and local advertising.

"If you look at markets like Indore, Delhi, or Chennai, you find that the local advertisers have also been occupying air time," he says.

Parigi estimates the percentage of national to local advertising to be in the region of 80:20 or 75:25, but he expects that ratio to change as Tier II and Tier III towns become more "buoyant."

"We are watching local vs. national ads," he says. "If we look globally, data points are Australia, the UK, the US - free market economies - it is 60:40 or 55:45."

As far as content goes, Radio Mirchi thrives on extensive market research to determine the wants of its consumers. The whens, whats, whys, wheres and hows of media consumption are constantly monitored. It is this research that led the station to launch `Visual Radio' in Mumbai and Delhi in mid-2006, and in Kolkata in January. Visual Radio is a free service providing pictures of artists, snaps of Bollywood stars and ring tones while listeners listen to Radio Mirchi on their mobile phones. Radio Mirchi has about 10,000 registered users who use Visual Radio on a daily basis.

"We are very sensitive and we are intensely involved in engaging our audience, any which way we can," Parigi says. "It is the need of the audiences to stay connected and to engage in an interactive way."

While connecting with the audience will be key for radio stations in the wake of the second round of station rollouts, Kaushik Ghosh, Senior Vice-President (Marketing) of Radio Mirchi believes that in the short term there will be homogeneity of talk and music amongst radio stations, but eventually market forces will lead to differentiation.

"In the initial phases everybody will sound the same because everyone wants to target the largest segment," Ghosh says. "But after 12-18 months, there would be a kind of shakeout and the people who are not in the 1-2-3 positions in that category will shift to another format."

Ghosh compares the radio landscape to TV. He says there are five or six English news channels, five or six general entertainment channels, so one should look at it in that perspective rather than wonder how five or six radio stations can all survive. Mumbai is a city of 15 million, he says, which is comparable to New York city, which has roughly 40 radio stations.

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