2. • Our initial audience targeted people between the ages of 13 to 30 years of age. We
wanted to steer our video towards people of this age because the genre we used, the
‘house’ music genre is popular throughout the world and it’s main audience is for teens
up to the party scene age, where people would use the music for it’s intended reason;
to dance to.
• After I had looked at the song we wanted to use on Soundcloud, seeing that people
who were commenting on the track displayed an interest in the house genre and other
electronic music, had ages that fell within this age range.
• Teen audiences like house music, and this was a suitable genre because it is just as
universal as genres like pop as anyone, whether they are young or an adult, can relate
and enjoy the music. I found that adults would suitably fit into the target market as
they would have grown up with house music, as well as experienced its creation,
growth and evolution whilst young people (teenagers) were born into it.
3. • I looked at various theorists who had discussed representation in their work, before
creating my music video, one of the main theorists being Stuart Hall. Hall suggests
there are three different positions that the readers can occupy when trying to
interpret a text: The preferred, negotiated and oppositional readings.
• The preferred being when the reader fully shares the texts codes and accepts and
reproduces the reading.
• The negotiated is when the reader partially shares the codes and broadly accepts
the preferred reading, but modifies it in a way that reflects their own position.
• The oppositional reading is when the reader, whose social situation places them in
the opposition to the dominant code, they understand the reading but do not share
the codes and reject the readings.
4. • An artist like Avicii attracts people throughout this age range, as his music is often
in the top 40 charts, it is introduced to both ends of the scale. Younger teenagers
may enjoy listening to this type of music whilst playing on their game console,
where as the older people may enjoy listening to it in a nightclub.
• Where as an artist like MK who has some popular sets, songs and mixes, would
not be as popular to the younger end of the scale, but his mixes may be heard by
people who enjoy this genre specifically and have told friends, or in nightclubs and
at parties.
I became interested in the genre when I was 16 mainly because of the evolution of
modern day youth culture, with music playing a huge part in this, with House
music being significant, in the party scene, to dance in and enjoy the atmosphere
more, and so I would fit into the age range we had set and we found it worked.
The typical member of our target audience would probably listen to mainstream
house or electronic dance music of artists including: Avicii, Duke Dumont, Route
94, Calvin Harris, David Guetta, Oliver Heldens and Martin Garrix Target Audience.
5. • Social media allowed me to look at what people view, comment and share the music produced
by the artists and the music videos which are popular which gave me and initial ideas of who my
target audience is: Youtube, Soundcloud, Twitter, Facebook, The specific band websites.
• We gathered information about house music from popular social media sites like Twitter, a
place where you’re able to give your opinions to simply give your opinions or debate with
others. House music came across as a very inspiring type of music, which people felt inside
them; “a body thing. A soul thing”.
• From this we were able to capture the essence of the house music genre and this inspired our
music video.
• We also found the posted single on YouTube and looked at the people who were commenting
on the song and it was clear to see that people who enjoyed Ashaft’s music, also enjoyed other
house music and other electronic dance music (EDM).
• As part of audience research I used social networks to help us determine the opinions of the
genre of our target audience as well as what they’d like to see. I thought it would be a good idea
to use social media to help influence our decisions on genre and looked at different peoples
opinions of the House music genre, and I was proven right by the positive tweets I found
surrounding the house genre.
6. • All the research I had conducted allowed me to created an informed decision on what
the target audience age range would be.
• I predicted the audience would consist of young males and females between the ages
of 13 to 30.
• I found both genders listened to the genre and would attract your standard young
person, but mostly a subculture of ‘Cheeky lads’; a group of young men who wear
skinny jeans, popular branded shoes, commonly have a comb over, and often attend
dinner at the chicken restaurant Nandos. Although, as seen from twitter, the age
range went up to thirty as tweets from older people (e.g. a man in his 30s) were very
influential because they demonstrated this resonance of house music through the
ages/generations, even though he was now in his 30s, he could still recall the feeling
house music had given him back in the 90s, recalling being young, full of life and most
importantly: Partying! Therefore, I also aimed to achieve this in my own music video
Tweets.
7. • After filming had began, we created a rough cut to show the general idea of how the
music video would look, and so that I could obtain audience feedback. To get audience
feedback I showed this rough cut to our audience, with a questionnaire to invite
responses and gain their opinions of the video, including anything they enjoyed and
their criticisms and things that we could improve for the video.
• Our audience told us that the video had some things to improve: due to the style of the
video, there were often slightly shaky shots throughout which people found out of
place and didn’t work in the video because they look unprofessional.
• From the feedback on the rough cut, it was clear to see that the music video had
potential but still needed work to become complete and look professional. The
responses ranged in being both positive and negative, for example the scene involving
the protagonist in the bus with red lights, whilst the video cut to the beat was by far
the favourite scene from anyone who watched the rough cut. A negative of the video
was how shaky some of the shots were and to overcome this stabilizing- handheld
camera equipment was purchased to see if it would improve the shots, which it did
massively.
8. • We interviewed some people who would not associate themselves in the target
audience for the genre. They believed the video was believable and they especially
liked the editing, the cuts working well with the drops in the song and the vibrant
colours.
• We used questionnaires after our first few stages of editing our footage and had
created a music video which at the time, which we believed was near our final cut.
• The feedback we received informed us that our music video was more convincing
than our original ideas for what our video was going to be. We were told certain
scenes like; the time lapse of the high street and the colourful footage of the red
lights in the bus.
• The synergistic elements between the music video, magazine advert and digipak
highlighting the protagonist, made the whole product believable. We were told this
made the music video believable and realistic, which you would see in the charts.
And this also helped us in our understanding in improving our video.
• We didn’t like the idea of a focus group as we had found them awkward for gaining
information in previous experiences: people struggled to voice their opinions in a
group, people spoke little, they often said the exact same thing as the person next
to them and this made us think, why not just do single person interviews and
questionnaires as they give us the same answers ad are easier to organise.
9. • Our digipak audience feedback for the completed digipak was taken: It suggested that
the product was successful in achieving synergy especially with the magazine advert in
addition to the music video.
• The feedback we received suggested that the product was successful in promoting the
artist, album & single, but also in conveying a realistic appearance, increasing the
potential for the digipak to appear in the shops as a real product.
• The use of my digipak connects well to the magazine advert and they collectively work
as promotional package for the music video. The use of elements between them e.g.
use of main artist and text create synergistic links successfully to promote the music
video, the artist as and the single.
10. • The magazine advert we discovered that the front cover of the digipak that is printed
at the bottom left of the advert didn’t fit well enough synergistically with the
magazine advert image. This was mainly because of the bright colours of the carrousel
in the background (e.g. pink, yellow and green) and the extremely pale complexion of
the main artist in comparison to the rosier complexion in the magazine advert. This
criticism was taken on and as a group we decided to remove the album image from the
magazine advert. It was then decided to change the central images of the digipak to be
closer related to the magazine advert by now using images taken at the same location
(Richmond) for example using 4 images of the main artist on the front and inside
covers and personal objects to the artist like his backpack and his penny board (which
does not feature in the video). I therefore believe that the second magazine advert is
more successful as well as the improved digipak because they became linked more
after receiving audience feedback, demonstrating that audience feedback was very
important in terms of improving my ancillary texts to promote the music video.
