Audience
Research
Why do people conduct Audience Research?
Audience research is conducted on a continual basis to keep up with trends in an audience and to maintain a competitive edge. Audience research is vital to understanding a target audience and increasing popularity and relevance in the music industry.
My partner and I conducted a survey to gather ideas and opinions that would help us create a music video tailored to suit our target audience. We wanted to make an artist, or artists, that would appeal to the preferences of our audience.
1. What is your age and gender?
This question was asked to get a rough idea of the age and gender of our respondents. This would help us to specifically narrow down on our audience to find an ideal target for our music video.
From these results I can see that mostly males and females from the age 16 and upwards responded to our survey. This is the demographic we will focus on.
2. What genre(s) of music do you like the most?
We asked this question to see if the genre of our song choice is popular amongst our audeince. This could mean that more people would like our music video.
Our genre is Alternative Rap, a sub-genre under Rap (not much HipHop). Rap was voted as a favourite genre by 53% of our respondents.
3. Do you enjoy watching music videos, and how often?
This question helps us to know whether our music video would be viewed by an audience. It is also important for finding out if a majority of our audience would enjoy watching our music video.
From our results we gathered, we can see that a majority of people actually enjoy watching music videos, and most people watch them very often.
4. Where do you usually watch music videos?
We wanted to know on which platform people watch music videos the most, so we know which platform is best to post ours based on popularity.
YouTube was the highest rated. So we will post our music video on YouTube.
5. What feature(s) of a music video is most important to you?
We wanted to understand what parts of a music video stands out most for an audience. With the results gathered from this question we would then have a better idea of what to include in our video to further engage with and appeal to our audience.
The song, performance, and narrative were the top three important features respectively. Hopefully our song choice will be appreciated by the audience. Perormance and narrative should be our main focus for the video, in order to appeal to the preferences of the majority (50-60%) of our audience.
6. Why do you watch music videos?
We asked this question to get an understanding of the general intentions of watching music videos, knowing what people expect to gain from one. This would help us plan our video in a way that aligns with the interests and expectations of the audience.
Over 50% of respondents claimed they watch music videos for sheer entertainment, and just fewer than that claimed it is to pass time. This means most of our audience would be wanting to be entertained for a brief moment, so our video needs to be short and sweet.
7. How likely would you want to watch a Rap music video?
Although improperly worded, this question is designed to gauge the likeliness of our music video, a Rap music video, being watched by viewers.
Given that over 60% of respondents were at least quite likely to watch a Rap music video, we can safely assume that our video would be watched by an audience.
8. What features do you think make a good Rap music video?
This question can help us gather ideas and influences from an audience which we can include in our music video to appeal to their preferences.
Performance and Mise-en-scene elements (lighting and colour; location and setting) were popular among our respondents. To attract our desired target audience, these features should be our main focus when filming our music video.
9. Which two styles (one male, one female) best suit an Alternative Rap artist?
We wanted to find out what styles of clothing our audience would expect to see on our artists. We gave them a choice of 6 different styles - three male and three female - and asked them to choose one of each gender that they like the most.
Image 1 was a female clothing style, and was extremely popular. The most popular male clothung style was Image 4.
(All images can be seen below the results.)
10. Lastly, which of the following names do you think are ideal for Alternative Rap artists?
To find possible names for our artists, my partner and I came up with a number of options for our respondents to vote on. We would then name our artists with the most voted names.
Malcolm and Chrisco were the two most voted names but, given we have a male-female duo, Chrisco will not be chosen. The two most voted (possible) names for a female artist were Acid and The Other Girl, the votes for each were tied.
Evaluation
There are a lot of faults in the survey we created so this limited our chance of efficient feedback.
To begin with, the first question was a multi-choice question asking for both age and gender. The age boundaries were overlapping and so it may have caused confusion for respondents when trying to pick their specific age group. Another flaw was that it was a multi-choice question, so some respondents' answers had included a gender and two different age groups or an age group with both genders, this caused an inconsistency in our results.
In an attempt to retrieve as much feedback as possible we asked a bit too many questions that consequently backfired as less useful results due to lack of coherence.
Our last question would also have been better if we had more, better, and distinctive names for both genders. For example, "Acid", "BalleTina", "Perks". These names just aren't that great and are better off forgotten.