Research Into Target Audience

For my audience research I am investigating how my target audience, (consisting essentially of aspiring girls of a similar age to the artist aged between 16 and 20, although the target audience isn’t completely female so males that fall into the same demographic will be considered too) consume music and how much they feel the music industry contributes to their day to day lifestyle. From my results I will be able to conclude the most successful and effective way to promote my artist in the forms of a music video, digipak and magazine advert to this demographic. Additionally I will be able to gather an idea of which mediums of media the song is expected to be consumed, what music channels it would fit best with and how the target demographic would like to see the artist represented..
In order to do find out this information I need to find out:-
• What genre/style of music they consume
• Where they consume it
• How this affects their lifestyle (clothing/hairstyle/social cliques etc.)
• What they want from their music – in terms of merchandise/extras when buying a single

I will create a questionnaire for 10 people to fill out, the questionnaire will be used to gather quantitative information based around the above areas.

Music Consumption

Male Female

What is your favourite music genre? Include examples of artists/bands
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________

How do you consume this music? Tick appropriate…
Radio What station/s? ____________________________________________
TV What stations/programme/s? _________________________________
Internet What website/s? ___________________________________________
Shops What shop/s? _____________________________________________
Gigs/Concerts/Festivals What venues? _________________________________
Other Please state _______________________________________________

Do you think the music you consume affects your everyday lifestyle?
i.e. clothing/appearance/social groups/attitude to life
Yes No

If yes which areas and how?______________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

If no why do you think this is? ____________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In what form do you buy your music?
CD DVD MP3 Vinyl Other please state_________

If you bought a single in CD format what would you expect to get from it?
i.e album artwork/band pictures/lyrics/extra songs/the music video etc.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

How much would you be willing to pay for a single?
Less that £1 £1-3 £3-5 £5-7 £7-10 £10+

Thank you









Quantitative Research Results
After handing out the questionnaire to 10 people that fit into the target demographic. I selected teenagers studying a-levels and asked them to fill out the forms whilst within their working environment so as to make sure they are concentrated on the task at hand and fill out the forms properly. I managed to collect information revealing trends showing how these 10 people consume music, their idea of popular genres, how music influences their lifestyles and most importantly how much they are willing to pay for a single and what they expect from it.

The first result is based on the target demographics most popular music genres. This is what came up:-


This shows that the demographic are mainly into mainstream genres especially pop and indie. Indie is a very vague label for a genre as within it consists a range of music styles often caused by hybrid genres being the combination of two or more mainstream genres or a combination of two or more mainstream and niche genres combined. By doing this labels are promoting their artist to a wider audience as they are covering audiences for more than one genre. This is something to take in to consideration when promoting my artists genre style and artist image, because if I combine her folk style with a more mainstream genre such as pop she is going to be more likely to succeed in attaining a substantial sized audience. As the genres that came up are all relatively mainstream they each can be found collectively on mainstream stations such as Radio 1, Smash Hits and NME. In order to promote my artist successfully she needs to be promoted through channels that have listeners that are going to be open to my artist’s style. On the other hand, by promoting the song on a specific genre station such as Kerrang! Rock station the song would be immediately dismissed as it wouldn’t be taken seriously by its audience. It is unrealistic to think that an unknown artist’s music is going to be played on prime time radio time especially on such well established stations such as Radio 1. But there are particular radio shows on often late at night on weekdays that do play unknown and unsigned artists and bands. Take for instance the Colin Murray show on Radio 1 where people can send in any music via email and he will give it air time if it is of a good enough quality to be played. This is a fantastic way of promoting an artist such as Ruth Bewsey cheaply and effectively.

This following graph leads on from the previous, as through analysing what mediums my target audience use to consume music I can establish through what mediums to promote my song to most successfully capture the audiences attention.
As I mentioned above, by promoting the song on mainstream stations would be the best approach at reaching my target audience, and through radio shows such as the Colin Murray show would be really effective. From this graph I can grasp that the radio and the internet are clearly the most popular form of consuming music. Of the people that had ticked radio as a form of consuming music the most popular were clearly ‘Radio 1’ and local radio station ‘Heart fm’ with 33% choosing Heart fm and 44% choosing Radio 1. This tells me that by promoting my music on local mainstream radio stations would be the most successful at capturing the attention of my target audience.
Internet being the second most popular choice for music consumption would also be an effective way of capturing my target demographics attention. From the questionnaires 28% chose iTunes as their favourite website for consuming music and 42% chose YouTube. Therefore it may be worth uploading and posting the video on YouTube and also creating a YouTube ‘channel’ for the artist where future videos from the artist could be uploaded and subscribers to the channel would immediately be notified of the new videos. By creating a ‘channel’ for the artist this essentially gives her a homepage within which she can edit profile pictures, information, background images, general photos etc. This is a cost effective and essential way of promoting an unknown artist as potentially the world can access this page. Also by making the song and video accessible for download on iTunes and putting a promotional image of the songs CD cover on the iTunes store homepage this may draw a lot of attention from interested members who are interested in all different genres, although in order to get an image of the artist on the homepage it is likely to be quite costly as you would have to pay for advertising space. Another way of promoting an unsigned artist like my own more effectively is through creating a MySpace homepage, MySpace is renowned for it’s music scene, and like with her YouTube channel the artist can create a profile that promotes her songs, her videos, her singles and albums, and much more. Then through adding similar artists that are much more established within the music industry she is going to be visible on their page and the audience from these artist’s are likely to click on her which will take them to her page and subject them to the world of Ruth Bewsey.

I asked this question so as to find how my target demographic prefer to buy music. Clearly from these results CD and mp3 are the only real contenders. Mp3 being the most popular, this is not surprising as through the likes of iTunes, Napster, Last.FM and Spotify downloading mp3s has become a much cheaper, more convenient way of consuming music than through any other form as they can easily be transferred to mp3 players and Ipods of which have become almost a necessity in the everyday life of our generation. Therefore it would be worthwhile to sell Sail Away in an mp3 format. CD is also clearly still a popular format to buy music in. Research has shown that this is because of the aesthetics and all the extras that come alongside the single itself, including the artwork, the inside booklet containing exclusive pictures of the band, sometimes which even unfolds into a poster, the extra songs that come along side the single which are usually songs recorded for the album but never made it onto the actual album, some come with even more. It is the ‘collectability’ that still attracts consumers to the CD. Therefore it is worth creating a CD and designing a CD cover and booklet/poster to go alongside to attract the target demographic to the ‘collectability’ of it. The questionnaire also asked what people expect from a single and here are all the different ideas that came up.

This makes it clear what is most asked for, the most popular being album artwork, lyrics, pictures of the band, extra songs and the music video. This can easily be done… with no particular budget. But when I asked the target demographic what they are willing to pay for the single this is what came up.

From this, clearly the majority are only willing to spend up to £3 which could be tricky in reality to create a CD format including all the above popular extras within this budget. A compromise would have to be made to either slightly increase the price barrier or to lose some of the extras. An interesting exercise would be to make a dummy version of one CD single with fewer extras for less than £3 and one with all the extras for over £3 and show these to a range of people within the target demographic and see which one they would choose and why!