Audience Research

This post has been created to show the audience research we have conducted in order to find our what our target audience are interested in. We have researched in to how to conduct a fair questionnaire, making sure it is not biased in any way. The analysis of our audience research can also be found in this post.
Bias
When producing our questionnaires, we had to make sure that our questions were not biased so as we could get an honest opinion from our audience. Biased is when you have an opinion for a certain like or dislike towards something or someone, therefore, making it an unfair/unclear opinion and overview.
There are ways in which you can be biased when conducting certain research, these are a few examples of bias:
Data -
Rejection of 'bad' data on arbitrary grounds, e.g. getting data and then rejecting it because of a certain opinion that you or a group of people may have.
Participants -
Pre-screening of trial participants, or advertising for volunteers within a particular group, e.g. you cannot just have volunteers who are smokers, you need a wider audience of people from all over the place so that they are not all the same.
Discounting trial subjects/tests that did not run to completion, for example: not including answers which are uncompleted, for example: in a test for a dieting programme, the researcher may simply reject anyone who drops out of the trial, but most of the people who drop out are obviously those for whom the dieting programme is not working.
In order to get past this bias we will have to be aware of people who are willing to provide answers which are equal.
Question Types -
When producing questions we will have to:
· be careful of the language we use as we cannot be misleading.
· everyone we ask needs to understand the question, so we cannot use media terms which they
will not know.
· we must consider the socio-economic status of our samples, e.g. education, where they live, income... their social class.
We will ask questions which people from all social-classes (working class/upper class) are able to answer. We cannot assume our prior audience of our own knowledge.

Audience Research Questionnaires




















Above shows a blank example and three filled out examples of our first round of audience research.

Questionnaire Answer Analysis

Quantitative Questions

Qualitative Questions

What artists do you like to listen to and why?
After asking ten people to fill in our questionnaire the top three favourite music artists chosen by our audience were: The Script, Lady Gaga and Pixie Lott – all chosen by 3 people. The Script can be classified under the pop/rock genre; Lady Gaga can be classified under a lot of different genres, including: pop, rock, dance… and Pixie Lott falls under the pop genre. Next with 2 votes each were: Mr Hudson, Jason Derulo and JLS. Then with only 1 vote each was: Scouting for Girls, Kings of Leon, John Mayer, Enrique Iglesias, Green day, Beyonce, You Me at Six and Paramore. Overall, the pop/rock genre seems to be the most popular as most of the artists fall under this category.

How do you currently listen to this music?
Music Channels seem to be the most popular way in which to listen to music – chosen by 9 people. IPod was the second most popular answer, chosen by 5, and then YouTube with 3 votes. As these are the most popular ways in which to listen to this type of music, we will look at artists whose videos are shown/music is played using these types of mediums.If you were to watch a music video, what would you expect to see?When asked which conventions they expected to see within a music video, these were the answers given:
Dancers
Good looking people in the video
Instruments
Band
Story line
As these are typical conventions which you would expect to see within a music video, we will include each of them within our own.

What are your views on artists playing their own instruments/backing bands? Should they play their own instruments or focus on their vocals?
The majority of answers told us that our target audience like to see artists playing their own instruments or at least showing the band within the music video.
What attracts you to listen to a musical artist, for example: looks, age, and gender? Why?
The most common answers to this question were age and gender. The main things that audiences notice about artists is how old they are and whether they are male or female.

Action Points

· We aim to target both genders between the ages of 16-20.
· We want to create our music video using the hybrid genre of pop rock. We chose this genre as 8 people said that they listened to this type of music within our age group. As both of these genres were popular, we have decided to use both of them, to create a sub genre. · We have decided that as most people listen to both male and female artists equally, we are going to use a female lead singer with the backing band being a mix of both of the genders.
· Also as the target audience said they do not have a preference between solo artists and bands, we have decided to use a lead singer with a backing band, so that it gives a mixture of both.
· As most people discovered the music they listened to through music channels, and carry on listening to this music via music channels, we aim to make a music video suitable to be shown on a music channel.
· We are going to use Pixie Lott, Lady GaGa and The Script as influences when making our band and music video, as these were the top three artists that people in our target audience listened to.
· In our music video, we will include the following conventions: dancers, good looking artists – who will appeal to our target audience, instruments, a band and a story line to the song being sung.
· In our music video we will include our artist either playing their own instruments, or show the backing band playing their own instruments.
· We have decided to use a female aged 17. This will help our target audience to be able to relate to our artist which is considered a generic convention within the music industry.

Second round of audience research




The video above shows us interviewing members of our target audience, both males and females between the ages of 16 and 20. We asked them the questions below to gain information for developing our band and how they would find it appealing.

Second round of questions for audience research
1. If you were buying a CD, what would you expect to see? colours, band members, instruments etc.
2. If you were in a pop-rock band, what clothing would you find appropriate for a music video or CD cover?
3. If you were using Facebook, would you take notice of a fan page for a new and upcoming band?
4. If you were to watch a music video, would you find the storyline relevent?
5. How much would you pay for an album or download?

Summary of questions

• Most people said that they will notice a facebook page for a new band.


• Our target audience said they will not pay more than £10 for an album or 99p for a download on iTunes.


• Our target audience said they want to see bright colours on the CD cover, to attract their attention.


• They also want to see the band members on the cover so that it is recognisable to the audience.


• The majority of people said they would like to see normal , casual clothing for the band members, to make it more relatable.

Action points

We will create a Facebook fan page and a Myspace music page, as Myspace is the top social networking site for both signed and unsigned music artists.
We will create an album cover which will feature our band members and a logo. We will use bright colours to catch the attention of our target audience.
We will dress our artists in normal, casual clothing so that the audience can relate to them easily. They will be wearing clothes the audience would/could wear themselves. This helps the audience idolise the artists.
We would sell our CD for under £10 so that it is easy for the audience to afford. We would set our download price at 79p on iTunes.

Third round of audience research