1B Audience

The project I will be discussing for this question is my advanced portfolio, where I created a music video called “Kiss Kiss”. When creating my music video I thought extensively about the kind of people I was appealing to and how I would do this. The target audience for my video is mainly men and women between the ages of 15-25, due to the fact that the main artist is a young male which fall in to the same age category, and the lyrics of the song can be evidential through high school life. Throughout the process of making my music video, I asked members of my target audience to look at my ideas and work and give me feedback so that I could ensure that it was specifically tailored to the wants and needs of my audience. I did this by making questionnaires where I would tell people in the age group to fill out. Julian McDougall quotes, “audiences still clearly make sense and give meaning to cultural products,” which means that audiences play an active role in the understanding of real media text. We wanted to gain an active audience for our music video as it appealed to a wide range of people.

I began by researching certain music videos that were represented as the same genre as my video. This would allow me to gain wider knowledge of the conventions that were essential for a R&B style music video. I used Goodwin’s theory when analysing the music video “All Of The Lights” by Kanye West and Rihanna. This music video was mainly performance based; however it had a narrative concept in the beginning. We wanted to create a strong relationship between the lyrics and the visuals as this was a key theme that was done in most music videos.

Another way of looking at how audiences consume media is reception theory, which is based on Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding model. It argues that producers encode meaning into a media text and audience then in turn decode it. When creating my music video, I encoded meaning in many ways. For example, I shot most of the video with close-ups of the artist whilst he was performing; this created the R&B genre. 

Furthermore, the main artist “Chris Brown” can be a role model to young people as he is a young person himself, at 17 years old and audiences can familiarise with him. When looking at other music videos we found out that many artists changed their clothes throughout the music video. It was never seen that the artist wears the same clothes. We then took this idea and changed the clothes of the artist when he was performing.

The uses and gratification theory by McQuail came to our attention throughout our advanced portfolio. Uses and gratifications theory is a framework for studying the effects of media on an audience, mainly from the perspective of individual audience members. The approach suggests that people use the media to fulfil specific gratifications. The audience seek out gratifications from the media, in our case, the music video. The audience seeks out a need and a sense of gratification. We focused on entertainment. The majority of our audience will be entertained by our music video; they can get cultural enjoyment from our music video by being part of that culture. Some people may simply relax while listening/watching our music video.

In conclusion I believe that our audience is active rather than passive where they can refer to the music video as how they feel. I think the target audience was in a good range as according to our research most people aged between 15-25 listen to this type of music.