Preliminary Audience Research

In today's lesson we explored the demographics of our population and learnt that audiences are tremendously more complex than simply gender or age. When studying audience and deciding exactly who our target audience is and how to appeal to them, we must consider social-class, race, employment status, background, location, lifestyle and obviously age and gender. The reason demographics are vital in analysing audiences is because what may seem as 2 very similar social groups may actually have complete opposite tastes. For example 2 women who are both in their 40's but one may be a housewife whereas the other could be a successful businesswoman, and due to their different lifestyles, their taste in music is likely differ greatly.

Conducting audience research is key to finding out what appeals to their individual tastes and what they personally think looks and sounds good. In our lesson we each asked each other a series of questions of find out about their music tastes and music consumption habits. My questionnaire looked like this:

Audience Questionnaire
Our project is to make a music video and in order to do so successfully it is vital to understand how different audiences perceive different types of music and music videos. Please take a few moments to complete the questionnaire so we can interpret your opinions to make a good music video!

1) What is your gender?
     Male       Female
2) What is your age range?
     14-16     17-19    20-25    25+
3)What is your occupation?
     Student    Employed    Unemployed
4)Which is your favourite genre of music out of the following:
     Pop   Indie   Rock   Hip-Hop   RnB
5)How often do you watch music television?
     Everyday    1xWeek   Fortnightly   Other (please state)..................
6)If you do watch music channels regularly, which ones do you prefer?
     Smash Hits    Kiss    MTV Rocks    Kerrang   Other (please state).....................
7)In you opinion do you think a music video necessarily needs narrative to make it interesting?
     Yes     No
8)If you have stated no please explain why ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
9)Name some of your favourite music videos
......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Because we only had the opportunity to ask fellow classmates these questions, their opinions were fairly similar, although not everyone likes the same genres of music. In order to broaden the depth of audience research as a group we will have to ask a much wider range of people from different demographics. This can be achieved by asking our parents/teachers, siblings and students in lower years. Doing this will provide my group with qualitative and quantitative data that we can use to guide us when planning the details of our music video.