What have you learned from audience feedback?

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

 

Audience research is carried out by all types of media institution to gauge what the demographic of their target audience is and what that particular audience want. One of the audience research techniques we used was a vox pop. We asked a selection of people what they wanted from music videos, what their favourite music videos are and where they watch music videos. Vox pops are effective as they can be quite short but can give you a huge amount of information and again can help to find out the target audience for a specific genre, in our case pop punk. Our target audience are typically aged between 11-19 so we asked the questions to people within this age bracket. This also helped us discover the difference between what an eleven year old expects from a music video and what a nineteen year old expects from a music video. This difference was not as vast as we thought it might be as we found out that often the most memorable music promos are often the most silly and fun but also quite simple. Videos such as Psy’s Gangnam Style were considered the most memorable.  

 

Another thing we also found out from our vox pop was that videos with a strong narrative are popular amongst our target audience and this adheres to the theory that music videos are now becoming short films. This trend for long cinematic music videos has been around for quite a while now; famous examples include Michael Jackson’s Thriller and more recently Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Bird’s trilogy of videos called Ride the Tiger. We decided that we should have a narrative but to split the video roughly 50/50 with a performance. When asked for a favourite music video one person chose a video that was about standing up to bullies and we thought that our video should relate to our target audience and their experiences. We decided to go with a relationship theme as we felt this is a scenario that a large proportion of our target audience will probably experience at some point in their adolescence. We found that pop punk artists often write songs about experiences that will relate directly to their fans or target audience.

 

 

The last question we asked in our vox pop was where and how they watch music videos. For this question there was a very clear theme in the answers. Every person we asked responded first with YouTube and this is what we were expecting. This told us that when releasing a video or trying to promote an artist that YouTube is the first place to go. It is now one of the biggest websites on the internet and is a hugely powerful tool for record companies and artists alike. A lot of people also said that they did watch music TV channels but not regularly and that they may have it on in the background at a social gathering or if there is nothing else on telly. This shows us that today television music channels are not as important as the internet for promoting an artist and this is perhaps a reason that often music channels will broadcast normal TV Programmes.

 

Another way in which we researched our audience was by holding a focus group.  The idea of a focus group is to get a small sample of people from the target demographic and find out what they think about our concepts for the music promo and digipak and also whether they liked the song. One drawback of a focus group is that people may not like to criticise somebody’s product or media text in front of them. In our focus group we got a lot of positive feedback about our plan for the music video. We also found that members of our target audience prefer a split between the narrative and performance. We used this information and made our video a straight split between narrative and performance.