Question 3

Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback.

Audience feedback was key for me in my construction stage. Due to the purpose of my media text being to sell the artist and their music the importance of audience opinion is large. The idea of producing a product for a target audience suggested it needed to appeal to a specific group of people without this the product would not be able to fulfill its intended purpose of selling. 

My audience feedback came in a few forms. An audience profile, which although is not audience feedback itself was important in aiding me in my future audience feedback, in order to establish my target audience, focus group feedback in order to gain an instant opinion on both my video but also my ancillary products and an online survey, created with Surveymonkey in order to establish a wider range of opinions throughout all of my target audience. 

My audience profiling

My audience profile allowed me to establish my target audience for many things such as, what music they liked, their age and gender and their psychographic segmentation (lifestyle and interests). From this I was able to determine who my video must appeal to and therefore what conventions it must adhere to. This was important to my audience feedback as it allowed me to distribute my online survey to, and create a focus group that was made up by this construction of a target audience. 

My online survey

I decided to distribute my survey through the use of social media, allowing me to be able to reach my target audience as well as a wide range of demographics and psychograpghics. In my online survey I started by establishing who was answering, asking for both age and gender. I did this in order to establish those who fitted with my audience profile and in order to filter out those that didn't. This was important because it meant that I was able focus on the feedback of people within

my target audience.  My responses, once filtered for those which matched my intended audience looked like this. With only a slight male majority I was able to get a better understanding of feedback from both genders and with people from a range of ages within my target audience I was able to get an understanding of a range of age responses.

Next I asked about their preferred music genre. From social media, Twitter and Facebook, I was able to present my survey to those who have similar favourites to my artist and therefore receive similar genres to my artist.

 This question allowed me to create links between demographics and music genres comparing age and gender to the responses of this question. It also gave me the ability to link the idea of genre conventions of my artist genre and the demographic and psychographics of the respondents. This helped me to choose the videos I analysed as part of my research and planning because I was able to clearly see which genres are popular in my target audience and therefore would be able to find what best appeals to my intended audience.

For the fourth question I decided to ask about the different ways in which my audience consumes their media. Unsurprisingly due to the state of the industry at the moment, every respondent except from one replied With either Youtube or a similar online streaming service. This isn't surprising because of the popularity of music videos on Youtube. Only one from the top thirty most viewed videos on the site isn't a music video.  Due to the nature of my artist and the lack of music videos they have produced, their Youtube presence is zero. However, what this tells me is that people of audiences similar to my artist use Youtube to fulfill their music needs and therefore it is this site I used to release my video as it was most suited and the one I am most familiar with.

For my final question I asked what the respondents favourite music video was. This allowed me to identify the links between genre of video and preferred type of video (performance, narrative or concept). I was able to establish the popularity of narrative and conceptual videos in similar genres to my artist. This aided my choice in the videos I chose to analyse as research but also on the choice of the type of my own video.





Focus Group

I decided to use a focus group in order to gain some audience feedback about my ancillary texts. I did this with both an online survey but also a verbal discussion with people that fitted my target audience. I initially shared the ideas of having a simplistic design that carried across both products with the use of more neutral colours and these were met positively with an agreement on how it could link to my artist and their position as an unsigned artist appealing to a wide audience. Once decided on a style I consulted them on the use of the font LT Oksana, which I had found on an online website and this too was met with agreement. I had originally decided to use the images on the inside cover of the digipak individually on the magazine advert, however the cluttered structure was described as informal and it was suggested that I followed suite with the convention of having the digipak cover as the center of attention. This I decided to compromise on and decided to show the inside of the digipak still in-keeping with the convention but challenging it slightly. Once I had created a final draft I created an online survey for my focus group to fill out, highlighting the themes, colours, fonts and graphics and also what worked and what could be improved. The negative feedback I got was scarce and what there was often contrasted to what another said was a positive feature. For example one said "The 3D feel of the digipak image" was a positive however another said, "Possibly the album cover in the centre. As its a picture, it feels like it breaks the clean look of the poster." I decided to keep the image because I felt it matched the unusual colours in representing the artist's genre as indie  different to the mainstream, more popular genres.