Advance Portfolio
A2 Media
Emilie Bowes-Read Media Studies
Our Survey:
We decided to do a survey so that we could find out first hand what our teenage target audience of 15-19 year olds want and expect in a music video.
I was quite surprised at this response from the target audience as I thought the number of people wanting visuals that directly link with the lyrics would have been higher than 80% and closer to 95%. But this shows that in our music video we can have more flexibility with our narrative and how close our visuals are linked. Obviously the majority of the target audience want the visuals to link in with the lyrics but it does allow for a bit more of an alternative narrative if that is something we want to go with.
This question was quite a broad one as it offered lots of options which can be said to overlap such as performance and entertainment. The results were as expected for this question in that the target audience feel that what you see is the most important thing followed by how entertaining the product is. I did think that more people would have possibly clicked narrative as their answer but nowadays music videos are becoming more and more focused on performances and dance routines filmed in different locations rather than a narrative.
This was a very close result with 47% voting that the performance of a clip is their preference whilst 45% voted that for them the narrative was a better style of music video. I feel that this is because of the trend that music videos have followed in which they are now heavily based on the artist performing or dancing during their videos rather than using external actors for a narrative.
Our target audience are teenagers who are notoriously always on their phones and so the fact that over 40% watch music videos weekly does not surprise me at all. I was quite surprised that nearly 20% watch music videos everyday as this seems quite a large percent however as music videos are now accessible 24/7 through sites such as YouTube it is a lot easier to search up a music video to watch instantly than it ever was before.
Since the increase of different genres of music the pop genre has decreased in popularity slightly and I feel this was reflected in the results for this question with only a mere 12% saying they would definitely watch a pop music video. I was quite surprised as pop tends to be the genre that dominates the charts and I thought the result for those who would watch a pop music video would be a lot higher.
Our interviews:
As a group we conducted an interview with 4 Year 11 boys aged 15 and 16 and 2 Year 12 Sixthformers aged 16 and 17 so that we could get a range of answers from our target audience. We also made sure we interviewed both girls and boys so that we had a different perspective from the two genders. I carried out the interview with the 4 Year 11 boys as they were ones I knew and so I knew they would be confident around me when giving their answers whilst Rebecca carried out the interview on the 2 Year 12's. They all gave some very good answers, some more in depth than others, some that agreed and some that contrasted with each other.
Below are two sound files with the two interviews.
Year 11 interview:
Year 12 interview: