No Rock And Roll Fun

NME-MTV-XFM: In a belated bid to rise to the challenge of EMAP stretching its brands from newstand to radio to TV, Viacom, IPC and Capital are creating a cross-media sales platform. Called RSVP, for Real Sound, Vision and Print, it's planned to offer advertisers packages across Capital's radio stations (including X-FM and Century), Viacom's TV output (MTV, VH1) and IPC's Ignite titles (NME, Loaded, Nuts and so on). While primarily pointing at the sales end of the businesses, it's likely the alliance will see the businesses moving their brands closer together - more so than already, where, for example, there's already a lot of crossover between MTV2 and NME. The problem may come in fields where the businesses are already heavily involved with a different partner - XFM's XRay magazine deal has recently expired, but XFM still provides a lot of support to The Amp, including a chart which is a direct competition to MTV2's NME chart. All this sort of thing is so much easier for EMAP to deal with, as it owns everything and can just force itself through its own chain of command. We're not expecting to see XFM rebrand as NME radio anytime soon, then.