About Quiero música en mi idioma

Quiero música en mi idioma

Quiero música en mi idioma, known simply as Quiero, is an Argentine subscription television channel dedicated to music in Spanish. Operated by Artear, the television arm of Grupo Clarín, it was launched on 4 August 2008 under the slogan Donde el rock vive, where rock lives, replacing the temporary channel BitBox TV and, behind it, Rock & Pop TV. From headquarters in San Cristóbal, Buenos Aires, it broadcasts Spanish-language rock and pop music videos and music programming to Argentina and, through pay operators, to a wide Latin American footprint including Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. Quiero is the custodian of a famous piece of Argentine media history: it is the direct descendant of the television service of Rock & Pop, the radio brand that defined a generation of Argentine rock listeners, converted into a channel whose name is itself a declaration — I want music in my language.

From Rock & Pop TV to BitBox to Quiero

The channel's lineage runs through three names in four years. Rock & Pop TV broadcast from 2004 to 2008, carrying the identity of the Rock & Pop radio station into television. When that service ended in 2008 it was replaced by BitBox TV, a short-lived transitional channel. On 4 August 2008 Artear launched Quiero música en mi idioma in BitBox's place. Reference summaries of the channel therefore list its former names as Rock & Pop TV (2004–2008) and BitBox TV (2008), and its launch as 4 August 2008, replacing BitBox TV.

The rebranding was more than cosmetic. Rock & Pop was a radio brand with a defined rock audience; Quiero música en mi idioma is a proposition that can hold the whole of Spanish-language popular music while keeping rock at its centre. The launch slogan, Donde el rock vive, kept faith with the inherited audience, while the channel's name opened the schedule to pop, melodic and Latin repertoire sung in Spanish. In a regional market where the dominant music channels programmed heavily in English, a channel whose founding promise was music in the viewer's own language had a clear and durable point of difference.

Artear, Grupo Clarín and the channel's corporate life

Quiero is operated by Artear, Arte Radiotelevisivo Argentino, the Grupo Clarín company that also operates El Trece, one of Argentina's major open networks, and pay channels including Ciudad Magazine and Volver. The channel's headquarters are listed at Bernardino González 962 and Rodríguez 1039, San Cristóbal, in the City of Buenos Aires, within Artear's production complex. It broadcasts in 1080i high definition, upscaled from standard-definition sources, with a 16:9 standard-definition feed. Its website is qmusica.tv.

One corporate episode in the channel's history is documented in detail. In August 2014, as part of Grupo Clarín's compliance with the Audiovisual Communication Services Law, the group decided to sell its shares in IESA, Inversora de Eventos S.A., to the United States-based investment fund 34 South Media LLC. Before the sale, Quiero had been placed within IESA, previously owned by Artear. The episode illustrates how even a small music channel can be moved between holding structures when a large group reorganises under media-ownership law — and how the channel on screen continued unchanged while its corporate owner of record shifted around it.

A channel for Spanish-language music

Quiero's programming is built around the music video and the music programme in Spanish: rock nacional from Argentina, Latin American rock and pop, interviews, live sessions, countdowns and themed blocks. Its name functions as an editorial rule — the music is en mi idioma, in my language — and that rule is also its regional export logic. A channel of Spanish-language repertoire can be sold across the whole Spanish-speaking market without the localisation a general entertainment channel needs, which is why its listed broadcast area runs from the Southern Cone to Central America and the Caribbean.

Within Argentina, Quiero occupies the space left by the retreat of international music channels from local production. Where global music brands increasingly became reality-television services with little music, Quiero remained a music channel in the literal sense: videos, artists and programmes about music, in the language of its audience. Its sibling relationship with El Trece and the Clarín group also gives it access to the group's events, artists and promotional machinery, while its own awards and campaigns, described below, built it an identity independent of its larger siblings.

Gustavo Quiero verte bien: the Cerati flag

The channel's most remembered campaign was an act of collective affection for Gustavo Cerati, the Soda Stereo leader and defining figure of Argentine rock, who suffered a stroke in Venezuela in May 2010. Quiero's campaign Gustavo Quiero verte bien — Gustavo, I want to see you well — invited the public to leave messages of encouragement for Cerati on a large flag. The flag toured several provinces of Argentina, eventually reaching 150 metres in length and carrying more than 15,000 messages. It was displayed outside the channel's Buenos Aires headquarters and in Mar del Plata, Mendoza, Córdoba and Rosario, at the Fleni Institute, where Cerati was treated, and at the Buenos Aires Planetarium, where thousands of people left their hopes and best wishes. The flag remained in the possession of Cerati's closest associates.

On 20 October 2010, at the Promax/BDA Awards held at the Marriott Plaza in Buenos Aires, honouring the best promotional work in Latin America, Quiero received a Silver award in the Special Project Promotion category for the campaign. The award recognised what the campaign demonstrated: a small music channel could convene a national act of public feeling around an artist, because its audience relationship was built on shared musical identity. Few Argentine channel promotions of the period are still recounted in reference works; this one is, in the channel's own history entry, because it expressed exactly what the channel exists for.

Escuela de Música and educational recognition

Quiero's programme Escuela de Música, Music School, alternately hosted by Carolina Ibarra and Bebe Contepomi — the latter one of Argentina's best-known music journalists — received an Honorable Mention at the 17th Premios Fund TV, announced on 4 July 2011, for productions aired in 2010. The Fund TV awards recognise programmes and advertising with educational value that benefit their audiences. The mention matters because it separates Quiero from a pure video-jukebox model: alongside rotation of clips, the channel made formatted programmes about how music works and how it is made, presented by credible specialists, and those programmes were recognised by an educational-television jury.

Taken with the Cerati campaign, Escuela de Música sketches the channel's full identity in its early years: a video channel, a campaigning fan community and a producer of authored music programmes. That combination is the standard recipe for a music channel that wants to be a brand rather than a playlist, and Quiero executed it within the resources of a niche pay signal.

Premios Quiero

Since 2009 the channel has presented the Premios Quiero, the Quiero Awards, recognising Latin American singers. Eligible nominees are artists with recently released albums whose music has been broadcast on Quiero. A dedicated awards property is a significant step for a music channel: it converts airplay into an institution, gives artists a reason to premiere and promote through the channel, and gives the channel an annual event around which to build programming, voting and publicity. The Premios Quiero also express the channel's regional ambition — the honourees are Latin American artists, not only Argentine ones, matching the channel's multi-country distribution.

The awards sit within a wider Argentine music-awards landscape dominated by the Premios Gardel, organised by the industry chamber CAPIF. Quiero's awards are not a competitor to that institution so much as a channel community's own honours: voted and programmed within the world of music the channel actually plays. For a niche channel, that kind of property is both content and marketing, filling the schedule while deepening loyalty among viewers and artists alike.

Distribution and regional footprint

Quiero is a subscription channel, carried by pay-television operators. Its listed broadcast area covers Argentina and Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Honduras and the Dominican Republic — a footprint that reflects the pan-regional carriage deals typical of Clarín-group signals and the universal intelligibility of its Spanish-language repertoire. Its picture format is listed as 1080i HDTV, upscaled to 16:9 for the standard-definition feed, and its web presence is at qmusica.tv, which has carried its news, campaigns and award coverage since the channel's early years; archived versions of the site document the Promax award and the Fund TV mention in the channel's own reporting.

Survival is itself a fact worth recording. The decades since 2008 have been punishing for music television worldwide, as video viewing migrated to online platforms and international music channels closed or reinvented themselves. Quiero's persistence rests on the two assets online platforms could not easily copy in its early years: a curated, locally rooted Spanish-language identity backed by a major media group, and a community relationship with Argentine rock audiences demonstrated most vividly by the Cerati flag.

Assessment

Quiero música en mi idioma, launched by Artear on 4 August 2008 as the successor to BitBox TV and Rock & Pop TV, is Argentina's dedicated Spanish-language music channel: rock at its heart under the launch slogan Donde el rock vive, pop and Latin repertoire around it, and a name that states its cultural position in five words. Its documented highlights — the Promax/BDA Silver for the Gustavo Cerati flag campaign in 2010, the Fund TV honourable mention for Escuela de Música in 2011, the Premios Quiero since 2009 and a distribution footprint across Latin America — describe a small channel with an outsized sense of purpose. In a market where music television largely disappeared, Quiero kept a simple promise on air: music, in your language.