Audience Research

Introduction When we first decided to do a music video we had a number

of different ideas that we thought would make a good music video. However, most of our ideas appeared to ambitious in reality so we had to re think and decide on something that would be both realistic and successful.

To be able to reach our selected target audience well we will have to conduct a number of audience research methods e.g questionnaires, focus groups etc. Before we decide on a certain plan for our music video this will need to be carried out.

QuestionnairesWe asked a number of different people of all ages to fill in our questionnaire

honestly. Our results enabled us to find out more about peoples perception of music and music magazines and what they actually want from it.

Questionnaires

Questionnaires

Results of QuestionnaireOnce we had collected in our result form our questionnaire we decide to display them in various types of graphs and statistics that would be easy to read and draw conclusions from. Below are a few examples of what we uncovered from the results and how we used the information in our work.

Results of QuestionnaireQuestion 5- What music genre are you most

interested in?

This I think is one of the most important questions in this particular questionnaire. From this answer we can understand what type of genre our audience is most interested in. This means that we can choose a song that will appeal to the more people. This graph shows that 70% of people enjoyed rock genre of music. This defiantly will influence our song and band choice.

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Rock Pop R&B Indie Other

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Results of QuestionnaireQuestion 6- what music magazines do you currently read?

Again with this question we can find a style of magazine that attractsaudiences. For example in this particular we can see that most peoplelike the ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine showing that people prefer the moreclassic and simple look. It also gives us another insight into the type ofmusic that our audience enjoys.

Roundhouse

NME

Kerrang

RollingStone

Focus Group ResearchFor our interviews on a focus group we showed a group of two people two

music video’s. these videos were ‘Lostprophets – Last Train Home’ and ‘All Time Low – Weightless’. We picked these two videos because although they are both of the same genre that we established our audience would want in our questionnaires they both have very different styles of videos. After the focus group had watched both videos twice we asked them five questions about what they thought of the videos. Finally we asked them which video they would prefer and why. This research enabled us to get a more in depth answer to what our target audience wants from a music video and this will be key when we are planning our

own one. Below is a copy of the questions that we asked the focus group;

Focus Group Research

Results from Focus Group Research

Question 1- Which of these two music videos do you prefer and why?

• We found from our audience that although they enjoyed the visual effects created in ‘All Time Low’ video the preferred the style, and overall video of the ‘Lostprophets’ video. I think that this represents the style of our target audience and helps us to gain a greater understanding of what they look for and enjoy within a music video. This question results has benefited our own production because we now have a video that we can loosely follow in terms of fashion and technique.

Results from Focus Group Research Do you prefer the ‘abstract’ feel of the weightless video or the more

realistic feel of last train home?

Our focus group defiantly preferred the second video that we showed them. This was the Lostprophets video for ‘Last Train Home’. This portrayed a more realistic storyline rather than the cartoon styled editing that ‘Weightless’ used. We can defiantly use this kind of information in our own production, because it showed us that the target audience enjoyed

a clear storyline with real characters that they could relate to.

Results from Focus Group Research Do these music videos help you to understand the lyrics in

the song? If so which one more than the other?

Our audience agreed that being able to understand the video was largely related to they way that the action on screen reflected the song in a literal and representational way. The group preferred the more literal way that ‘Lostprophets’ song illustrated the song lyric and meaning. I think that this shows us that we need to have not only the representational elements of the song but also to give the audience a story to follow that links to the songs lyrics and meaning.

Results from Focus Group Research What do you personally like to see in a music Video?

We found that our audience enjoyed to watch a video that matched the pace and energy of the song. For example a fast paced song should have more upbeat high energy action where as a slower song should have a more slow paced action that reflected more of the emotional meaning. I think that for our video we will defiantly adopt this idea. Our song is a slow song with a higher paced chorus. We can use the verses to demonstrate the emotional meaning where as the chorus to show a more heated side to the song.

Results from Focus Group Research Do you often watch the music videos to songs that you like?

Our group said that they often did see music videos on music channels on television. In today's modern, more technology advanced world people now have more ways of viewing a music video and our focus group utilised the internet and other forms of technology to see videos. They expressed to us how they would often see a video on websites such as ‘Youtube’, they said that this was a good way of hearing about music videos and seeing other peoples thoughts and opinions on the video. Videos are now being shared though social networking sites such as ‘Facebook’ and ‘MySpace’. I think that this would be something that we need to consider in terms of how we would distribute our own production to the audience.

Results from Focus Group Research What are some of your own personal favourite music videos? (please list

three)

This question was to gain an further understanding of what our audience wanted in a video and how they felt about certain other videos. By looking at the videos that they mentioned, we could observe the common elements that were included and we could look at incorporating some of them into our own video.

From our focus group in general we found a number of elements that we could incorporate into our video. We used the information that they gave to us to highlight what our target audience anted and enjoyed in videos and were able to analysed how e could create a video that our audience would enjoy.