AUDIENCE

Audience is crucial to media institutions; finding your target audience gives you something to work to and a group of people to appeal to. My audience research participants were mostly within the 16-20 age range so I began trying to appeal to them, but I realise that audience isn’t a fixed variable. Julian McDougall suggests that the progression of the online age is making it harder to conceive audience as a stable and identifiable group. Likewise, McQuall says audience can be described as a ‘temporary collective’. Both theories mean that audience is becoming harder to actually identify as the digital age gives us access to websites such as Spotify, Soundcloud, Music Roamer, and 8tracks, which help to expand our knowledge on a genre, delve into sub-genres, and become a fan of many more musical artists than once before.

The easiest way to go about finding our audience would be to identify the genre. My song’s genre is arguably alternative / dream pop. This would suggest that my audience is more than likely alternative – the pop element would suggest a link to mainstream whilst dream pop as a sub-genre isn’t well known in terms of all musical genres. However, it is something that is easily accessible like all music due to the fact that we can find close to every song we want to.

To apply finding the audience for my product, the audience research tasks helped because I was able to see what the general age range likes. In terms of relating it to similar products to appeal to different audiences, we know that this isn’t something we can actually set as audience is constantly changing. However, I looked at videos of similar genres to help me to see what is appealing to other audiences.

To find similar artists I’m not aware of for this, there are a number of different programs that can help me find similar artists to my own. MusicRoamer allows us to search the name of an artist or genre we’re a fan of and it will generate artist suggestions for the user. Then we can click on the suggested artists if we like their music and more artists will be suggested, creating a chain of similar musical artists for the audience to listen to. For example, here I typed in Halsey:

This helps me because I have a wider range of artists to now compare my own production to in terms of similar audiences. I can then look at any of their existing music videos on YouTube to see if my ideas correspond with theirs and in turn, see if my video will be successful in appealing to the audience.

Another good program for expanding your music taste is 8tracks: this is where online users can create playlists and share them publically so that others can listen to a particular type of music. Playlists are tagged with genres and moods so that the audience can find exactly what they want. This is useful because chances are, we will come across a playlist with some artists we’re aware of and some we’re not, expanding our knowledge of genre and our music taste.

TOP TO BOTTOM: Little May / Hide, Zella Day / No Sleep To Dream, Lowell / Palm Trees.