DIDDY LAUNCHES REVOLT - All New Music Channel

Revolt, Combs’ new all-music channel, launches this evening on Comcast and Time Warner systems in more than 20 million U.S. homes.

Combs, who recently topped the Forbes Five list of richest hip-hop artists, with a net worth of $580 million, has never been one to stand pat. He has spoken of identifying “white space” in the market where MTV withdrew to focus on reality series and stopped playing videos. While Fuse, AXS, Palladia and, to some extent, VH1 are keeping the old-school notion of Music Television alive, Revolt wants to superserve younger music fans more comprehensively than any rival. Cable operators, as part of a regulatory arrangement designed to ensure greater diversity on the airwaves, have offered Revolt favorable initial carriage terms.

 The network’s value proposition is that music may have been through bumpy times as an industry but the fundamental hunger for new content is as great as ever and the media environment has never been more perfectly conditioned for a nimble, low-overhead, open-source entry. The new network aims to do old-fashioned things like premiere new videos and break news about new songs or scandals in the works and serve as music’s virtual town square. CEO Keith Clinkscales cut his media teeth as an executive at ESPN and points to its well-honed knack for flooding the zone — and scoring clicks and ratings — when it comes to major stories about key sports figures. “For fans, there is no such thing as ‘enough,’” Clinkscales says.

When I spoke to Clinkscales recently for a Broadcasting & Cable interview, he was quick to invoke Combs’ Gatsby-esque stint as a Hamptons impresario as a curatorial model. “I remember for years going to Sean’s parties,” he said. When you were at his parties, he didn’t just play his music. He would play whoever was banging, killing it at the time. ‘They’re killing it. Run it back. Run it back.’ He’s a fan of music.”

Revolt CEO Keith Clinkscales

Speaking with Clinkscales, it’s easy to feel the persuasive pull of Revolt’s mission. (While I am not a millennial, the degree to which the emergence of MTV defined my childhood makes me an alpha target for Revolt in other respects.) Still, there are undoubtedly some steep challenges ahead. And there are reasons MTV long ago ditched its original setup. Here are the five things Revolt needs to do well in order to make good on its strategy:

Deploy Diddy wisely. As much as Combs will power the network, in the manner of Oprah Winfrey with her channel, OWN, the scope of Revolt will be far broader than hip-hop. It will seek to have tentacles in every direction — pop, country, EDM, etc. As Clinkscales says, “If you make a network for fans and you stay true to that mission that we want to be for the fans, then you can’t have it be from one person’s point of view. We got to have as much dialogue as possible. That’s what music is. It creates dialogue. It creates discussion. Do you like it? Do you not like it? And that’s the kind of thing that I think is missing in the music game.”

Combs is a peerless marketer and a titan of social media. His fans pay attention to what he thinks and does. The critical thing will be to use that when it counts. When Revolt was looking to get on the radar of more consumer brands, for example, executives traveled to Cannes Lions this year for some key meetings, which came together as a result of Combs being on the ground.

Never mind the ratings — for now. Executives insist they are not under the gun in terms of generating big ratings right out of the gate. At launch, the ad-supported network will have commitments from about 10 sponsors, and to grow that figure, viewers will obviously be counted. But the low profile of where Revolt sits at launch is far better than Fox Sports 1 or FXX, which have cleared more than 70 million homes in launches this year. MTV’s tack away from music and news and toward reality has brought big success but also escalating pressure to outperform. The privately held Revolt won’t be under the same scrutiny, so it should revel in that freedom. One tends to forget that MTV was commercial-free at launch. How else do you think they were able to veer so appealingly far from center?

Earn a good rep. Combs spoke last summer during the Television Critics Association press tour about Revolt’s goal to develop into a CNN-type brand (echoing Public Enemy rapper Chuck D’s famous declaration about rap music being “CNN for black people”). This can happen over time, but it will depend on a relentless focus on the caliber of news (balance and an avoidance of glaring inaccuracies will help); a keen tastemaking ear and eye; and a feel for the artists and images that deserve to break out, as opposed to just catering to labels, publicists and managers. Music is bubbling up in more settings than ever — videos, declared dead just a couple of years ago, now command tens of millions of YouTube views and propel independent, fringe artists like The Weekend or Macklemore & Ryan Lewis into the mainstream. If Revolt can manage to serve as a reliable guide through this dynamic, ever-shifting landscape, that alone will prove its worth.

Mix and match platforms. If Revolt succeeds, it will be as a full-blown transmedia play, with news breaking on the website and then driving tune-in to the linear channel and vice versa, with social channels amplifying the effect. It is no accident that YouTube clips, Instagram images and a host of other digital messages have preceded the launch of the linear channel. Having closely observed how different networks handle this orchestration, it continues to surprise me how much separation there is at many big TV players, with digital and linear operations still not fully integrated. Revolt has a chance to blaze a trail in that way, and in fact its ability to be truly platform-agnostic (a concept many speak about, few convincingly) will be a key measure of its early performance.

Build trust with millennials. Combs has talked about not wanting to use the term “millennials.” He prefers “young people” or “kids,” as in his statement of purpose about Revolt: “My mission is to get kids back to TV.” It is a fickle crowd to win over, and several others are sniffing the ground where Revolt is hunting. Maybe a more flexible posture should inform the mission. Rather than rallying them “back to TV,” it would suffice to convince millennials to at least keep TV in their media diet instead of cutting the cord.