1. Defining Your Audience
The audience are important as they will generate the success of the music
video, the more views the video gets ultimately the bigger the profit. A way of
measuring how popular an artist’s music/song is, is by looking at how many
‘hits’ their videos have, this establishes an idea of how wide the artists
audience is. An artist’s aim is to gain as big mass audience as they possibly can,
this is why most videos focus on voyeurism and show many close up’s of the
artist. Today, much media is free and is financed by advertising. Therefore,
advertisers want to invest in the right artists to bring in more profit for their
company. For example, advertising garden equipment won’t appeal and bring
in much profit if the target audience is teenagers. So, usually advertisers will
pay the medium a sum to advertise through them, this therefore increases the
music institutions profit.
Its key to find the appropriate target audience for our artist (Childish Gambino)
a way in which we can find out what type of audience is most suitable is by
researching uses and gratifications. This theory states that people use media to
gratify certain pleasures.
“U & G arose originally in the 1940s and underwent a revival in the
1970s and 1980s. The approach springs from a functionalist paradigm in
the social sciences. It presents the use of media in terms of the
gratification of social or psychological needs of the individual (Blumler &
Katz 1974).”
“U & G theorists argue that people's needs influence how they use and
respond to a medium. Zillmann has shown the influence of mood on
media choice: boredom encourages the choice of exciting content and
stress encourages a choice of relaxing content. The same TV programme
may gratify different needs for different individuals. Different needs are
associated with individual personalities, stages of maturation,
backgrounds and social roles.”

2. These quotes from the users and gratification theory show us why we have
different audiences and why we interact with them.
There are four main reasons for common use for using the media:
Information- E.g. Satisfying curiosity and general interest.
Personal identity- E.g. Finding reinforcement for personal values.
Integration and social interaction- E.g. Gaining insight into
circumstances of others.
Entertainment- E.g. Getting intrinsic cultural or aesthetic enjoyment.
From these four reasons we can see that the audience want to gain new
information and reinforce their own personal views and tastes. Also, it helps
them interact socially with others and to gain entertainment ‘escapism’ these
are important factors that we will take into consideration when choosing our
target audience.
We can use the social grade scale to see what type of people we think would
be interested in our music video. The NRS have produced a scale of putting
different types of people into specific categories.
The National Readership Survey provides the most authoritative and valued
audience research in use for print advertising trading in the UK.
It covers over 250 of Britain's major newspapers and magazines, the surveys
show the size and nature of the audiences they achieve.
The NRS aims to evolve
partnerships with leading
digital data sources to
provide the most accurate
and up to date audience for
the future.

4. These graphs are based on the categorisation of the first table. These produce
more of an understanding of what each category is likely to spend their money
on. From these we can establish that people in category Amake the most
money and therefore spend the most money. Whereas people in category E
have less money therefore they spend the least. This research gives us an
introduction to which demographic of society still buys music. However, it’s
important for us to find out who listens to music within the genre we are
tackling.
From looking at this data we think our music video applies to category E,
unemployed, students, pensioners and casual workers. Many people who
watch pop-rap type artists are mostly students, young adults and teenagers
therefore; we feel this is a very suitable and appropriate demographic
category.
This is where BARB (broadcaster’s audience research board) has very useful
research that can help us establish the specific audience for our music video.
This website holds new up to date research of the average viewer’s weekly
intake of the channels they watch and how long for. For our genre pop-rap we
think the music channel most suited for our video would be MTV, BARB says
that from the 9th of October on average a person spent 1 minute on the
channel in a week. I compared these figures with a new music video that had
been released for a week on YouTube, I looked at Justin Bieber’s new song
called Beauty and the Beat, and this had over 43 million views. This shows us
how now the internet is solely the main way in how we watch and access
music, YouTube being the most predominant way in which the audience views
music videos.
RAJAR (Radio joint audience research) is the radio equivalent to BARB, The
stats below tells us how many people on average in the UK listen to the radio
through different technologies. From this we can establish that ‘online’ is most
popular, this backs up previous research as our example from YouTube showed
a vast majority of people now access music via the internet compared to their
TV.

5. When creating a music video its key to know who your target audience is, we
need to know what kind of people are watching our music video and what
interests they have etc. This is important as then we can try to appeal a specific
group of people that we feel will be interested in our music video. In terms of
uses and gratifications most people watch music videos for entertainment. Our
aim is to produce a music video that a vast amount of people will definitely
want to watch.

6. There are different ways in which we can target our audience. Abraham
Maslow came up with a triangle which is where we the audience are put into
different 'layers' of needs, and to move from one to another you need to
satisfy one before you can move on to the next one. Everybody starts at the
bottom.
The main focus when targeting our audience is to get the widest audience
possible, as this will potentially bring in most profit.
In terms of demographics, the audience is put into categories based on:
Occupation and industry
Marital status
Presence of Children
Household tenure
Income
Education
Media consumption
However, for a music video the aspects of how people are measured in terms
of psychographics are probably more suitable when defining our audience,
these include categories such as:
Sex
Age
Gender characteristics
Sexuality
Social grade
Working status
Psychographics is one way of describing an audience; it labels a person and
makes an assessment about their lifestyle. It was Young and Rubican
(advertising agency) who invented a psychographic profile, this is known as the
4c’s Marketing Model. The 4c’s stands for Cross Cultural Consumer
Characterisation. This marketing model puts audiences into groups so they
know their position in society.

7. From looking at the psychographic and demographic profiling it’s important
that our group need to decide on which target audience will be most suited to
our music video.
We feel that our target audience are in the 'aspirers' category. Many
teenagers, young adults and students are influenced by social trends and
fashion, influenced by their friends to watch new music videos. With this
generation, pop-rap artists are very popular and we feel that this category is
very much suited for our target audience.