What have you learnt from your audience feedback?LAUREN COLES

Our Audience

Our audience is teenage girls.

This is the usual target audience for pop music and we decided to continue to fit into this convention.

We thought about the sort of things that we generally knew about what particular pop fan girls liked and created an audience profile. We found images of stereotypically ‘girly’ things and also the type of music out target audience would like, this included One Direction and Taylor Swift.

Pleasing Our Target Audience

Once we had defined our target audience as teenage girls we then had to make decisions about what our music video, digipak and website needed to include in order to please this target audience.

We decided to use bright colours, focussing mainly on pink, and to ensure that we use a lot of props. This makes our media products very visual, this is important, as it is common that with the pop music industry, music isn’t the most important factor and image plays a big role.

Audience Subcultures

Different people within our target audiences may identify with the 3 characters in our music videos, this will mean that we will have subcultures within our target audience, each potentially wanting or expecting different things.

Importance of Audience Feedback

Audience feedback is very important and it is used a lot in the music industry. It is vital that the music and media for the music that is being made is made with the audience in mind. This is so that the producers know that the audience will like the products or so that the producers can get information for future reference.

As the audience is what brings in the revenue for the music industry it is important that the producers take what the audience said into account. This is because if they do not the audience may decide to look elsewhere for entertainment and this could mean some artists making less money.

Methods of Audience Feedback

There are a variety of different methods of audience feedback which are used by industries.

With the increase of technology and what technology allows us to do, a lot of audience feedback is done online, through interactive websites and commenting on YouTube videos.

This feedback is easily collected and viewed.

Other forms of audience feedback is through questionnaires or surveys.

Research and Planning

Audience Questionnaire

We created a questionnaire to find out the genre of music that people liked, thus finding out what age group liked pop music. We mainly focussed on people within the age that we thought our target audience would be and then asked some people on either side of the category age bracket. This meant that the majority of the responses that we got were from people that we think would be interested in the music and the media that we would be producing.

We asked questions about music videos, digipaks and websites in this questionnaire.

MUSIC VIDEO

What do you expect in a pop music video? We asked this question to try and gain an insight into what people would want

to see in pop music video and this question gave us some important results as it gave us some ideas about what to include and which things to prioritise.

Although having a dance routine was the most popular we chose to ignore this because we felt like a dance routine would not fit with the narrative that we chose. Narrative was one of the highest choices along with props. We chose to incorporate these heavily into the music video.

DIGIPAK

What do you expect from a special edition CD (Digipak)?

We asked this question to establish what is expected in a digipak.

The results shows that pictures of the artist/band were the most important thing and that the next important thing was to have a track list on the digipak. The next highest choice was to have lyrics, however I chose to have these on the website as it would encourage people to go onto it, especially as a lot of music is watched/listened to online.

I tried to follow general conventions of pop media and pop artists’ digipaks when creating mine, however the response to the question in the questionnaire allowed me to see what our target audience want to see in a digipak so I made sure to incorporate these findings into my digipak.

WEBSITE

What features do you expect to see on a music website?

I looked at different music websites when planning my website to ensure that I stuck to conventions. I also wanted to find out what our target audience would expect to see to ensure that I include things that they would like.

The most popular choices were music videos, tour dates, images of the artist and social media links. I decided to use this response and made sure to include each of these things.

Post Production

Questionnaire

After we had created our music video, digipak and website we created a questionnaire to give to people after they watched our music video. We showed the video to people that were within our target audience, so that we would get a response from the people who would actually have an interest in pop music.

We asked a variety of questions that asked the audience for their opinion on our music video and checking to see if we were successful in creating a video that was clearly from the pop genre.

What genre do you think the video belonged to?

We asked this question because it was important to us that we made the video easily identifiable as a pop music video.

Out response showed that we were successful in doing this with 19 out of the 20 people asked correctly selecting pop as the genre.

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Did you enjoy the music video?

This question was asked to make sure that our video was enjoyable to our target audience, something which was kept in mind when producing the video.

17 out of the 20 people asked enjoyed the music video.

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What would you rate the music video as?

We then wanted to find out what people would rate the music video, as either very good, good, average, bad or very bad. This was to get an understanding of how much our target audience enjoyed or didn’t enjoy our video.

The majority of people asked gave the video a rating of good with 3 saying it was average and 1 saying that it was bad, This is expected as people have different likes and dislikes so we are happy with this response.

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Did it have a good storyline?

Narrative was a key aspect of our music video so we wanted to see if we managed to make the storyline good and clear.

18 out of the 20 people asked said that they thought it had good storyline, indicating that we were successful in creating the strong narrative that we set out to do.

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Would you buy the single based on the music video?

We then wanted to see if we had managed to make the video a good promotion of the song by asking if people would buy the single based on the music video.

14/20 people said that they would buy the single.

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Do you think the music video looked professional?

The final question that we gave members of our target audience was whether the music video looked professional.

We felt that making the video look professional was one of our main aims.

I think that we were successful in doing this as 16 people said that they thought the video looked professional.

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Improvements

After carrying out post-production research I think that our music video was successful in having the effect on the audience that we had initially planned.

I would have like to have made the video even more obvious that it was a pop video, as although we felt that we did this enough, someone thought that the video was from a genre that wasn’t pop.

I think this could be done by going back to the initial audience feedback in which we asked what people expect to see in a pop music video. I think that we could have included a dance routine in the video as this was one of the most popular choices.

Conclusion

My audience feedback was very helpful and I think that it is very important to carry out audience feedback.

My feedback allowed me to find out exactly what my target audience wanted to see and allowed me to find out what their opinions of the finished media product was. This meant that I could intentionally include certain things to please my audience and also made me aware of the things that I should potentially do differently next time.