We completed our audience questionnaire in our group, bringing together our results in order that we had sufficient and a range of information in order to aid us in creating our product. We each asked around 40 people ranging our results. Our questionnaire contained both demographic and psychographic information, including quantitive and qualiative data. We used this when creating our detailed audience profile, we now know exactly who is it that we are aiming the product at and can base our cross media campaign on this information to ensure that we carry this out successfully. We then created graphs and tables displaying our results so that we could access these easily.
In our group we decided on the genre of Pop Rock, we are all focusing on our analyses in order that we can develop ideas for our product with key codes and conventions. We often used BBC radio one's chart list to look at the CD covers and videos as this lists singles under the heading of our genre.
Analysis of results (brief):
The majority of the people we asked were between the ages of 17 to 22. We tried to vary the age ranges but people of this age range were easily accessible to fill out our questionnaires and we mostly know people of this age range. We think that this is going to make a difference to our overall results. The majority of the people we asked were female; again, although we tired to vary it we tended to ask more females than males. The overall preferred genres were dance, rock and pop so we went with the genre of pop rock after researching both pop rock and dance music and also videos and CD covers. Our genre result is definitely affected by the age range that we asked especially since genres such as alternative, world and country were preferred by no one that filled out our questionnaires. Most people said that the cover is important to them; this would influence their choice heavily and would need to grab their attention.
Target audience ( Audience Profile):
From creating our questionnaire we were able to create our audience profile so that we knew exactly who our target audience was and who our product was to be aimed at. We decided to aim it at both genders however more towards females, this was perhaps affected by our results as we tended to ask slightly more females than males.
We decided that they would be of the age 16-25 as this is the age range determined from our questionnaire; this is also the age range that would more than likely be listening to these songs as part of nightlife and social occasions.
Codes and conventions:
We will use the codes and conventions of CD covers and videos in order to conform to our genre so that we create our product effectively.
Music video:
We analysed 6 music videos from our genre of Pop Rock. We found that in order to conform to the genre when creating our product we need to keep in mind that there are very specific conventions for the videos of our genre such as the following:
- Intercuts are used to link scenes and characters
- Lighting is often natural to add to verisimilitude
- A direct mode of address is often used
- Colours are often quite plain and natural
- The editing is very fast and pacy linking to the style of music
- Costume plays a major part, establishing artists and setting up a 'look' meaning that they easily recognisable.
- Often a male or a relationship is featured in the video
- Some kind of performance whether it's the artist singing at someone or the artist performing for a crowd.
Magazine posters:
Originally we had trouble in finding 6 print adverts. We looked in magazines and on the Internet but these are proving hard to find. Perhaps this is due to this no longer being such a popular way of advertising.
We have looked online and have been to magazine shops yet haven't been able to find adverts for our genre of music. We have been able to find many adverts for rock in magazines such as Kerrang but magazines such as 'Smash Hits' and stereotypical music magazines are no longer available. We also looked at MixMag but again didn't find an advertisement for our genre. We think that we had so much trouble as we were looking for an advertisement promoting specific tracks by the artist.
We considered other ways of advertising such as billboards yet still struggled to access these. We have used many search engines such as google and ask.com. We have looked for both adverts to promote artists and albums yet have been unsuccessful.
The significant absence suggests that advertising and promotion through magazines is no longer such a useful or such a efficient way of promotion. In recent years technology has advanced so much that provides a much more efficient way of advertising.
We are going to look at the supplement in the Times newspaper, even if we are unable to access advertisement for our genre, at least we will be able to analyse various adverts and get a feel for them. This will more than likely pose a small problem when we create ours as we won't have any specific codes and conventions to follow, we will have to be very careful in doing this as we could make a grave error.
We have since brought The Times, however this proved unsuccessful as we found no print advertisements in this edition for any genres, we have decided to look at the 'new media', we are going to analyse 'my space' pages, most of these pages have their own identity when advertising the artists and we believe that this stand us in good stead for creating our advertisement as it will appeal to the younger generation, this being our target audience.
CD covers conventions:
- Features the artist or band, central to the frame
- Uses a direct mode of address
- Copy: lower case or capital lettering or sometimes a mixture of both
- Copy: minimalistic and all that the audience needs to know like band/artist name
- The colours often natural
- The colour scheme from the front cover is carried onto the back, extremley common with the genre.
- Clothing often mimics the style of the music and is quite edgy
- Women artists challenge gender stereotypes, seem out of control
Narrative theory/issues concerning representation:
Often the videos conformed to Todorov's narrative theory, there was a clear linear narrative to establish the story for the audience. Often the videos challenged Propp's stereotypes as the female artist often had power and status challenging the idea of men holding all the power and dominating women. This is often displayed in 'Pink' and 'Avril Lavigne' these females take dominance and they have status, they aren't controlled by men, challenging society's ideologies concerning gender roles. There is no 'princess', 'father', 'hero', 'villain', these videos completely contrast with Propp's theory.
We also looked Dyers star theory as we thought that this was appropriate for developing our product for how the star (the artist) is constructed to appeal to the audience. 'The concept of a star is an image. The star persona is constructed in line with the ideologies of the institution and is intended to appeal to the audience. The image often has little relation to the reality of the star.'We know that this will be important in constructing our 'star' in engaging the audiences attention.
Institutional context:
For our institutional research we must consider factors such as record labels, who will sign it? We must also consider websites, what websites can we put the product on? What websites contain music videos? We can look at websites such as channel 4 music. We also need to consider new technology such as IPods, this can affect our product as the image has to be much smaller to fit o a ipod screen and must still be recognisable, and these are things that we must consider. We also need to look into the background of music television, it hasn't always been around. We need to consider also the television channel to put our product on, we have looked at MTV however we know that there are many other Channel's that we could promote our product on, which we could also look further in order to have more background knowledge to develop our product.
We looked at the history into dance music, we also looked at EMI, the history into EMI, information such as acts signed, how successful they are and how appropriate they are for the band/artist we are using. This is helpful to us as we need to know where we will send our CD, who will be our record label. EMI have a wide variety of artists, they specialise in new and upcoming artists and have been the record label for artists like Lily Allen and The Sex Pistols, they have two categories, also having EMI publishing. They get their money from sales and date back to 1897, being one of the oldest record companies to date.
We also looked into MTV, we thought that this channel was a good match for our genre; also as it is very well known we thought that it would be an appropriate institution for us to research. The people watching this channel would generally be our target audience, they would be fans of pop rock music and expecting this genre, immediately we would have their attention.
It is also important to consider that MTV is a digital channel therefore a subscription to a provider like SKY or Virgin is needed, this means that their audience is slightly limited however in the next few years with everyone going digital this will not pose such a problem. It plays both underground and mainstream videos so has a wide target audience, it also plays tracks that aren't so well known 'up and coming' artists, this would be ideal for our product as the target audience would need to get to know the band well.
Inlay 2
back cover
