Why is a target audience important?
The Music industry by and large is a business, it is almost impossible for people to release or make music without thoughts of profiting from it. Identifying the target audience allows a business to focus marketing efforts and finances on the groups that are most likely to buy from you. With this, a generated business leads in an efficient, and affordable manner. Furthermore, having a target audience allows us to determine the types of the medium we need to use to reach our audience. For example, Instagram is a great advertising medium for a younger audience as the majority of its users are 18-24. However, if we want to reach an audience of older generations we could use Facebook because its biggest users are aged 24-34.
AUDIENCE THEORIES
Theodore Adorno – Passive Consumption, Hypodermic Model (Frankfurt School): suggests that mass media could be very influential to a very large group of people directly by providing them with appropriate messages manufactured to provoke a desired response. The bullet theory suggests that the message is like a bullet, fired from a so-called "media gun" into the viewers’ "head". The hypodermic needle model suggests that media messages are injected straight into an immediately influenced passive audience. They express the view that the media is a dangerous means of communicating ideas because the audience is essentially powerless to the impact of the message. People end up thinking about what they are told because there is no other source of information.
Henry Jenkins - Fandom Theory: believes that fans enjoy media so much that they create content based on the text and leading to them creating a community, this makes the audience prosumers. This has been made global due to the use of the internet and the fact that more people are interconnected through this medium. Fans take content from media text and create unique forms of media based on the original text. An example of this is the novel turned film "Fifty Shades of Grey" written by E.L. James. The trilogy was based on the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer.
Martin Barker – Challenging Moral Panics: “Barker suggests once you have entered into a debate about violent video games for example you must have already decided about negative media effects”. Martin’s early work focused on media racism, and he coined the phrase “the new racism” in 1981 in the context of public discourse about immigration.
Stanley Cohen – Moral Panics: “Recent stories about young audiences’ behavior after playing violent video games reflects a common moral panic that some media like the Daily Mail constantly seek to remind its readers of”. Cohen believes that the media plays a significant part in enforcing moral panic. the media overreact to aspects of behaviors that challenge social norms. The media’s representation then helps to define it, which then leads to outsiders adopting and observing these behaviors based on what they see in the media. The moral panic depicted by the media fuels further unacceptable behavior.
Cohen defined his five stages of moral panic as:
Something or someone is defined as a threat to values or interests
This threat is depicted in an easily recognizable form by the media
There is a rapid build-up of public concern
There is a response from authorities or opinion makers
The panic recedes or results in social changes
David Gauntlett – Producer as Consumer (Prosumer): “Media Studies students regularly make their own short film productions but are also regular consumers of the media – in doing so they are both producer and consumer blurring the boundaries of traditional media consumption”. To be a “prosumer” is to be the one who produces new things, and to be a “consumer” is to merely absorb the things society already gives us. Without the prosumers, society cannot flourish and it becomes boring. A prosumer is one who consumes, creates, and synthesizes with the media. Gauntlett also had the "Pick & Mix Theory" which focuses on the way in which magazines and advertisements attract and represent audiences. His suggestion is that audiences are sophisticated and use texts to satisfy their needs. They pick the bits of the text that are appropriate to them and their lives and ignore the others.
George Gerbner – Cultivation Theory: “The cultivation theory suggests that the more you look at television, the more you are likely to believe in the reality of the representation e.g. believing everything you see and hear on BBC News 24 and not challenging the nature of a constructed text”. George Gerbner introduced cultivation theory in the 1960s as part of the Cultural Indicators Project to examine the influence of television on viewers. Cultivation theory holds that long-term exposure to media shapes how the consumers of media perceive the world and conduct themselves.
Stuart Hall – Audience Positioning and Dominant, Negotiated, Oppositional Readings: “Some texts, like The Mighty Boosh, may have a number of readings, dependent on an audience – a dominant reading could be that it is a postmodern representation of celebrity culture while a negotiated reading could be that it is simply surreal and funny while an oppositional reading could be that it is childish, subversive and offensive”. He suggested an active relationship between producers, message and audience. Hall considered the role of audience positioning in the interpretation of media texts by social groups. He suggested that every media text has a preferred message which a producer wants to get across (encode) and that three ways in which the audience might be positioned to receive (decode) that reading.
Katz and Blumler – Uses and Gratifications Theory: “Different audiences gain different pleasures from a media text e.g. Gravity can be enjoyed via diversion or escapism, it can use surveillance to give information to audiences and can also be discussed on forums and blogs as a form of developing personal relationships (common also in video games). Personal identity can be developed with audiences who relate to certain characters more than others”. They believed that the user seeks out a media source that best fits their needs The uses and gratifications theory assumes the audience chooses what it wants to watch for five different reasons.
Information and Education – Acquire information, knowledge, and understanding by watching programs.
Entertainment –Watching for enjoyment.
Personal Identity - The ability to recognize a person or product or role models that reflect similar values to themselves and mimic or copy some of their characteristics.
Integration and social interaction – the ability of media products to produce a topic of conversation between people.
Escapism – Computer games and action films let viewers escape their real lives and imagine themselves in those situations
Jeremy Tunstall – Primary, Secondary, Tertiary Audience Engagement: “Watching films in a cinema involves a primary mode of audience engagement as the spectator is immersed with the narrative while watching a program at home on television may involve eating a meal at the same time, texting, using social media or other additional activities. Tertiary audience engagement is using the text as background media like music radio”. Audiences passively or actively consume media depending on where they are and what they are doing, they fall into three categories; Primary, secondary, and tertiary audience engagement.
Primary audience engagement - The cinema requires the audience’s detailed attention to watch the films being screened.
Secondary audience engagement –The audience consumes in the background perhaps while they are doing something else, for example, a radio program that is being listened to while the listener is driving a car or a soap opera on in the background while the audience is on their tablets reading social media posts.
Tertiary audience engagement –The audience is almost unaware they are consuming for example adverts in a magazine they are reading or on a billboard they walk past, another example might be radio on in the background while you are in the shop.
Albert Bandura - Media Effects: My knowledge of Bandura is connected with A-Levels Psychology as his Social Learning Theory is always applied in explaining the causes of different concepts (for example aggression and offending behavior). He focused on the effects of the environment rather than biological makeup on behaviors. Bandura is known for his ideas on vicarious reinforcement, this is when the frequency of certain behaviors increases as a result of observing others rewarded for the same behaviors. The bobo doll experiment exhibited that children copy behavior they see, this is applied to the media effects theory; media products can directly implant ideas into the mind of audiences. He believes that mass media influences the attitudes and perceptions of the audience members. An example of this is Grand Theft Auto (GTA), this game is advisable for 16 years old and above due to its violent content, however, a lot of younger audiences still play it as there is no solid regulation for the game. This fosters the idea of how stealing, beating up people/animals, etc. are ok as long as it's rewarded and as long as they don't get caught. The American Psychological Association has concluded that “the evidence strongly suggests that exposure to violent video games is a causal risk factor for increased aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, and aggressive affect and for decreased empathy and prosocial behavior.” (source: https://www.apa.org/topics/video-games/violence-harmful-effects)
Richard Dyer - Star Theory: Suggests that a star’s meta-narrative impacts the consumption by the audience. He argued that the star image is manufactured and artificial and that individual stars have their own unique selling point (brand values) in order to grab and hold our attention. An example of this is Marilyn Monroe, she's naturally brunette but she's known for her blonde hair. This was controlled by film companies in order to create an icon and attract audiences to the films they were making and therefore make money for the company.
Clay Shirky - End of an Audience: argued audience behavior has progressed from the passive consumption of media texts to a much more interactive experience with the products and each other. New digital technologies and social media have made connecting and collaborating incredibly easy. He also suggested that audiences are now consumers and producers hence the term "prosumers". In the ‘old’ media, centralized producers addressed atomized consumers; in the ‘new’ media, every consumer is now a producer. Traditional media producers would ‘filter then publish’; as many ‘new’ media producers are not employees, they ‘publish then filter’.
These amateur producers have different motivations from those of professionals – they value autonomy, competence, membership, and generosity. User-generated content creates an emotional connection between people who care about something. This can generate a cognitive surplus – for example, Wikipedia can aggregate people’s free time and talent to produce value that no traditional medium could match.
THEORY APPLICATION ON OUR MUSIC VIDEO
Uses and Gratification - Katz and Blumler
We want our music video and artist to be able to inform and educate, for example, our artist (Myriad) is socially aware and also makes music about women's experiences and we will show this through her social media platforms and also the symbolisms and themes that her music video will present). By having content that informs and educates, audiences can relate and align their personal identity with our music video and artist. By having an audience that can relate to the content we produce, they also consume our products for entertainment.
Encode and Decode - Stuart Hall
Our music video is about breaking away from the misogyny and toxicity of love or relationships that people unconsciously put themselves into because they don't wanna give up and they wanna show their love to their significant other even if it ends up consuming them. We want to convey a message about how society expects (as implied by the lyrics of our song) to put others first even if they compromise their own feelings and life for others. We hope for our audience to be able to decode this and position themselves with the dominant or even a negotiated reading that although it's difficult and can be a slow process, self-love and transforming ourselves for the better is always possible.
Fandom Theory - Henry Jenkins
We want our artist to have a close relationship and to be relatable to her audience. Through this, we hope that our artist will have loyal fans that will create social media fan pages about her, and also promote her on their personal social media accounts. Tiktok has been recently used by fandoms to make fan edits (for example montage of their favorite group or artist) and this is what we aim to have for our artist.
End of Audience - Clay Shirky
Our artist is also a consumer and producer of media products, like "normal" people, we want our artist to engage in other media crafts (for example she listens to another artist such as Adele and she would share this on her Instagram).
Star Theory - Richard Dyer
We want to go against Dyer's theory wherein our artist will not be a commodity. We want our artist to have a sense of authenticity and although it is fully impossible for this to happen because the whole music industry is a business; we still want to represent our artist as someone who has autonomy over her opinions and activism.
Binary Oppositions - Levi Strauss
We want to illustrate meaning and symbolism through the usage of binary oppositions. For example, we have light (red and blue) to show coldness and warmth (love) and to also show the color representation and connection with the female and male characters. Pick n Mix Theory - David Gauntlett
Despite our music video being conceptual and thematic, we still build a story... with this, we hope to gather an audience that relates to the message of "remembering your power" and transforming into new and better versions of themselves. Through using Gauntlett's theory; we hope to gather an active audience that controls the representations they want to engage with and can actively reject those that do not appeal.
AUDIENCE RESEARCH
In order to get feedback and suggestions regarding our song choice and digipak, I have made a survey using Microsoft Forms. Initially, I only made it for our song choice. However, I decided to add Annie and I’s digipak design for more feedback. I would not include the results here on the digipak, as the purpose of that was for comments on the design. There was a total of 17 questions (15 without the digipak feedback), Teachers and students from Harrow Beijing were both allowed to participate. However, we also had participants from Facebook after I posted the survey QR code. There was a total of 22 responses.
Based on the results, we have decided that our primary audience will be 18+. We believe that trip-pop is a genre that 18 years old and above will like as long as we carefully make our music video in a way that it compliments the song. Almost everyone has answered Instagram as a social media they use, the second close was Tiktok. With this, we decided that for marketing, and interaction with fans, we will use these two platforms mainly.
The Results are below!
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