The focus group was informed about R&B music and asked preliminary questions to assess participants' existing knowledge of R&B artists. Participants did not initially name R&B artists as favorites but became more engaged after discussion. Old and new R&B music videos were then shown and participants preferred older videos with more narrative elements that helped tell a story. Modern videos focusing on wealth and sexuality were less favored. Participants' preferences between performance and narrative videos varied, with some preferring the storytelling of narrative videos but performance videos focusing directly on the artist and song also proving popular.

1. FOCUS GROUP
YEAR 13 FEEDBACK

2. The first thing that we did in the focus group
was inform the participants about what we will
be talking and asking them about. (This included
the background of R&B and information about
common conventions and the development of
R&B over time).

3. We then asked if they already knew anything
about R&B, and if so to explain it and let us
know how far their knowledge extends. We also
asked the participants of the focus group who
their favourite artists were in general and this
allowed us to see if anyone's favourite artist was
an R&B artist. Although initially, the participants
didn't mention R&B artists in particular as their
favourites, once we began to talk about recent
and old artists, it sparked an interest and they all
seemed very enthusiastic about them with good
knowledge.

4. We then showed the participants after gathering
some general knowledge about R&B music
videos some old and new music videos in the
R&B genre so they could compare them and get
a feel for both narrative and performance based
videos.

5. We then asked them initially which one they preferred
the most straight after watching the videos and found
that they generally preferred the older music videos
because they had more of a narrative which meant that
they could help you tell and understand the story and
also it was more interesting to them to watch with an
added sense of reality. We also found that they didn't like
the more modern R&B music videos as much due to the
fact that they focused primarily on wealth and success
which can come across as negatively (arrogant) as well as
the desirable, sexual representation of women which
sparked controversy within the group, by where I decided
to ask the question to the males in the group "Would you
be more willing to watch a music video if there were
women in it?" and they replied that it doesn't really
matter to them and it wouldn't attract them to watch a
video.

6. Another question asked is 'do you think that you
will prefer a video more if the artist performing
is the same gender as you?' There were varied
answers to this question as in the R&B genre,
most songs are produced and performed by
men and this commonly targets the females
however, there may be less focus on the artist in
the video so people of the same gender who
listen to the music must listen to the because
they like the song.

7. We then asked everyone in the focus group whether they
prefer performance or narrative based videos and as they
are a media class, they knew what these were and didn’t
have to explain. We then showed them extracts of videos
such as Drake - 'Started from the bottom' which is very
much narrative based and compared it with Usher - 'Yeah'
which is mainly a performance by Usher himself. The
audience were undecided upon themselves. Some people
enjoyed the story telling element of narrative music
videos as it was something to look at and help
understand the song, however it was easy to see that the
most popular was the performance based video, Usher as
it focuses more on the song itself rather than a story
which allows the artist to dance to his own music and let
the music play without distractions.