AUDIENCE RESEARCH – Survey Analysis

Question 1It is clear from this question that a large proportion of our audience is actually female, with 58% of our audience women, only 38% men, as well as very few who identified as other or preferred not to say. This is not particularly surprising as Music is rarely dominated by one gender however this can be used to identify certain features we could include in our promotional package, for example using more female orientated conventions to cater for as larger section of the audience as possible.

Question 2

From the second question we can see that nearly 70% of our audience are within the 17-21 age range with no more than 10% coming from any other group, this is definitely something we should try and represent through our promotional package as the 17-21 age range is so far ahead. This is exactly what we expected from our results and our work will be based around appealing to this section which can also incorporate the 13-16 and 22-39 ranges as these both had a combined 15% of the vote and are not too distant from where the main section of our audience lie age wise.

Question 3In the third question we asked our audience where they watched their music videos and the recurring answer was on YouTube with 84%, whilst very few people watched on TV or through the artists website. This is again what we had expected and this puts emphasis on the importance of modern technology within the music industry and the uploading of music videos alike. The media is ever developing and it is clear to us that our music video and promotional package would find their place on-line through YouTube rather than through a more traditional means such as Television.

Question 4For our fourth question we used a ranking system to ask our audience how important certain features are to them within music videos. In general the responses were quite varied with ‘An easy to follow storyline’ being seen as a main feature for a good music video as well as the appearance of the artist themselves accompanied by a range of interested camera angles. The fact that the audience want a storyline that is easy to follow is something we will aim to make possible through our work by making a simple and effective story that can still contain a more complex theme. Having a fast cutting rate was seen as the least important feature in a video which actually came as a surprise as we imagined that more people would appreciate an editing pace to match the pace of the song. In contrast to that it was not surprising that lip syncing was seen as relatively insignificant and not something people see as a requirement for the enjoyment of content.

Question 5From this question, we can see that our audience believe the ‘Pop’ and ‘Indie’ genres both produce the best music videos. We also had comments from people who didn’t believe either of these four genres made the best. Some suggestions came up in the ‘Other’ section such as Alt. Pop & Rap. However, only one person suggested this idea, therefore we will not consider these when creating our products. I don’t think we were really surprised at the volume of popularity for the Pop genre, since this has been the biggest genre for a very long time. We were perhaps a bit more surprised at how close behind indie was, however. Only 2 less people said this and though it is a popular genre, I don’t think we anticipated prior to the survey that it would be this close to Pop. I did, however expect that Electronic Dance Music would be the least popular as this is usually aimed at a very specific target audience, therefore implying why only 4 people voted for it out of the 98 that took the question. I was a bit surprised at the fact that ‘rock’ only got 19 votes. I thought that if anything would come close to the pop genre, then that would have been it as it is another popular genre around the world. However, perhaps the reason it didn’t was due to the fact that it is aimed at very specific people (similar to EDM). The general consensus with rock music tends to be that you either love it or hate it.

Question 6This was a very interesting question. We decided to ask it to see just how important people believe music videos are. It was interesting to see the contrast between our respondents. We had a handful of people saying ‘100 ‘Very Important’’, while a number of other people chose ‘1 ‘Not important’’. I find it interesting to think about this and in further research, I’d love to ask people why they think there is such a contrast. It may be that the people who chose ‘1’ also chose ‘I don’t watch music videos’ for Question 3, so to them a music video isn’t important. This is quite likely. The average score between all of our respondents was ’57’ which is 7 points above ‘Somewhat important’. This implies that the average person believes that music videos are important to the success, however maybe they believe it’s not the deciding factor and there are a lot more important features to it than that.

Question 7Since we are going to be making a full promotional package, we decided it would make sense to ask about the digipak which we plan to make. We figured that the majority of people probably wouldn’t know what a digipak was, hence why we put ‘album cover’ in brackets. The median average for this came in the ‘Not usually’ bracket. I was a extremely surprised at this, because I thought most people would say ‘Yes’ and ‘Usually’. I guess that one reason for this not being the case could be that the majority of people just care about what the music is like and don’t really care about what it looks like. We wanted to ask this question to find out, if for whatever reason our digipak didn’t actually look great, would it still be bought? At the end of the day, this will not affect the effort we put into it as we will still make it look as eye-catching and good as possible, because there were 5 people that said ‘Yes and another 15 who said ‘Usually’, therefore we do have people to please with the look of our digipak. At least now though we have the assurance that if for whatever reason it goes horribly wrong; that will not have a huge effect on whether or not people choose to buy it.

Question 8For our final survey question, we decided to ask what content people wanted from the additional DVD. The respondents were able to tick as many boxes as they liked. I was not surprised by the response. All of ‘Music Videos’, ‘Tour Highlights’, ‘A Full Live Performance’ and ‘interviews’ were popular and I expected this because generally these are what are featured on most additional DVD’s. We also had four people that ticked the ‘Other’ box and gave alternate answers. One person suggested that they’d want all of these things if they were paying extortionate prices. We also had a couple of inappropriate answers, which perhaps are the downsides of audience research as when you’re just choosing anybody and they can do it anonymously, some people can be awkward and not fill it out properly. Therefore, we will choose to ignore these answers when planning and producing our products. We will however take into account all of the popular choices and attempt to feature as many as possible on the album DVD.