Research - Audience Identification

Audience Identification...

An audience is a group of people who identify themselves as viewers or listener in the media. Every artist in the music industry has an audience who listen, anticipate and discuss their music on platforms such as social media. Audiences can be used to be targeted specifically by artist and their record labels in order to increase or repeat financial gain. Audiences would tend form into a fan base for artists which in this case they would then tend aspire to be like that artist by copying trends, style, behaviour etc.

Why categorise an audience?

Advantages:

• It is easier to target and identify
• Allows audiences to make specific choices depending on audience
• Have an idea of who is interested in what
• Profit/budget balance according to audience expectation

Disadvantages:

• It can be biased, stereotypical or both due to individuals having different views and ideologies.
• It doesn't consider that people are different, despite having a similar job.
• It doesn't consider people's interest, just their income and status.

There are four specific things which you would need to know about your/ a certain audience; 

-Income bracket/status

-Age

-Gender

-Ethnicity

-Race

Knowing these credentials about your audience can allow you to narrow down specifically who consists of your loyal fan base. This will also help you target to more particular audiences, making the distribution of an artist's music much more successful. This is because known and distributing to the same audience will create a repetitive process of financial gain in which a record label would sell an artists music with the same material to the same audience.

Audience Reactions:

This table displays six specific reactions which occurs when an audience views or listens to an artists music. 
Audience engagement: links to Hebdige's theory because he stated that reactions differed from person to person due to them coming from different cultural backgrounds in which this would influence the way people read into texts.
Audience expectation: links to Goodwin's theory because he argues that the industry consists of many stereo types which an artist would need to meet the audiences expectations according to the stereotypes, in order to keep them interested.
Audience Identification: links to Dyer's theory because he argues that an artist would have certain ideologies and characteristics that their audience would know and understand, which in this case they would then portray likely behavior to that artist.

Conclusion: This research has further developed my understanding into what makes and creates a target audience. This also allowed me to develop an idea of what my target audience would be when creating a music video and campaign with my group. i have a brief idea of my audience being of the ages of 16 - 30 simply due to my genre of music being a mixture of Hip Hop and R&B. This means that I will have to match the audience expectation according stereotypes and work class categories being C2 to E. This will boost the success of my music video as i will know specifically who my music and video content would attract to.