R&P Post 12: Audience Research

Hello there! It's nice to see you again! Welcome to another research and planning post. In this post I will be writing about the audience that our music artist will be aimed at.

Our Target Audience:

Above: a mindmap we created, describing our target audience.

Our target audience consists of both boys and girls, but with a focus on girls, aged from 12 to 21 years old. This is because the song that we have chosen ('You Are The Solution') fits into the genre of mainstream pop and dance music and the general target audience for this genre is young people from both genders. However, our song is primarily aimed at young women because of the lyrics which make it a love song which attracts much more the female gender rather than the male gender.

Demographics:

Above you can see a table showing the different types of demographics. Demography is used in media marketing to organise an audience into age, gender, race as well as other possible categories. We feel that our audience most fits into the demographics of C2-E. In particular we feel that the majority of our audience fits into the E category because much of our audience will be made up of students and casual workers. However, we also wanted to include the demographic categories of C2 and D because since our artist is a debut artist, she will not be well-known in the music industry but in order to gain more recognition for her we are expanding our target audience. People in C2  and D will also listen to our artist because our artist belongs to the mainstream pop genre of music and many people doing 'blue collar jobs' and manual work will often listen to the radio whilst working and commonly listen to mainstream pop music. However, we felt that the demographic groups of A-C1 would not fit into our target audience because people belonging to these groups do not usually associate themselves with mainstream pop music. This could be because they may not be able to connect to these artists who produce this type of music and do not relate to the meanings of their songs. 

Psychographics:

In terms of psychographics, we feel that our audience would be made up of mainstreamers, aspirers, explorers and reformers. Mainstreamers will make up the majority of our audience because our song's genre is very mainstream pop and the group of mainstreamers are focused on their appearance and their fashion and styles. This is something that is key to pop artists as the way in which they are represented to their audience often involves their own fashion styles and their physical appearances. Mainstreamers are also usually young people and although our artist is open to older audiences (our secondary audience would be people who have a keen interest in mainstream pop or festival-type music), the vast majority will be young people. This is similar to the psychographic groups of both aspirers and explorers who are also commonly made up of young people, particularly students. Explorers look for energy and excitement and this is definitely something that our song provides as it is very fast-paced, attracting explorers towards our artist. Aspirers, on the other hand, are much more like mainstreamers in the sense that they are attracted to fashion and appearance which will be a key part of our artist's representation and marketing, attracting this psychographic group to our artist. Another category that is included in our audience is reformers. Whilst reformers tend to look beyond the world of mainstream things, they are still aware of current trends through their awareness of 'good taste'. Although this group may not be a huge part of our audience, they may still be attracted to our artist because due to our song belonging to the genre of mainstream pop, this music genre is very popular in today's society which could then attract reformers towards our artist because they are aware that our artist is part of this current 'good taste'.

However, we feel that succeeders, the resigned and strugglers would not fit into our target audience. This is because they usually consist of older people and have much more traditional values which our artist does not necessarily support as they are part of the current trends and are not a part of tradition. These groups may also not connect with our artist and do not relate to them. 

Below you can see a moodboard created on Pinterest which represents our audience:

In order to successfully market our artist to our target audience we also need to know what they like, e.g. some of their interests and hobbies that they have. To find this out we interviewed a group of people who are part of our target audience and below you can read through the different questions that we asked them:

1. How old are you?
2. What are your hobbies and interests?
3. Do you go and watch live music?
4. In what ways does music influence the type of person you are?
5. Where do you usually discover new artists?
6. What artists do you currently listen to?
7. What platforms do you use to consumer music?
8. Do you buy your music?
9. How often do you listen to music?
10. What are your expectations of a music video?
11. How do you relate to specific pop artists?

You can watch a video of our interviews just below:

The majority of the people we interviewed were aged between 17 and 18, who are a large part of our target audience. When we asked them our questions we found that...

• In response to question 3, there were mixed answers. Some did not like to see music live whilst others did.
• Many of them felt that music strongly influenced them as a person and represented who they are, including the way they dress and their behaviour. As well as this, we found that music influences them by getting them excited and making them happy, allowing them to have a positive connection with the artist.
• When answering question 5, we found that the majority of our interviewees discover new artists through online means, including Spotify, SoundCloud and YouTube, with Spotify being one of the most common.
• Most of them listen to similar artists with the most common genre being pop and rap/hip hop.
• Again, they mainly use the internet to consume music, using websites and apps such as YouTube and iTunes. Some also use the radio to listen to music.
• One of the most important things that we found out was that the majority of our interviews do not buy their music. However, some pay for Spotify Premium subscriptions and some buy CDs or records but the majority will listen to music for free.
• Their main expectation of a music video is for it to relate to the song itself so that there is a strong connection between what they can see on screen and the message of the song. This means that we should create a strong narrative for our music video that also connects with the lyrics and meaning of our chosen song.

From this research what I have learnt is that our music video needs to successfully cater for our target audience. We need to create a music video that our target audience can personally relate to; it needs to be a piece of work that represents a personal experience that members of our target audience might have been through themselves, e.g. a romantic relationship which is one of the most important features of our music video. By including this is our music video, we will enable ur audience to connect with the song and the video because, since the majority of them are teenagers, they most likely will have experienced some sort of romantic relationship or love interest. So we have now got one key way which we will b able to strongly involve our audience within our music video. Another very important thing that I have learnt from this task is that the vast majority of our target audience use the online world to consume music, using media platforms such as YouTube, Spotify and SoundCloud to listen to music. Therefore, we should consider which online platforms we might choose to release our song and our artist on so that we can enable our target audience to easily access our debut artist's music.

Thanks for reading and come back again soon!