Audience Identification

When chosing the genre of the music video, we took many things into consideration, one of which is that we talked about the genre. Collectively as a group, we knew the most about R&B and Hip Hop and as they are the most influential genres to youth culture we decided to undertake this.

When it comes to target audience we took many aspects into consideration Daniel Chandler's theory, these aspects included social status, age, gender and other media consumptions for example what they would read and watch. In terms of social grouping we have decided to target a young age group from ages 16-22 and both genders, we decided this as it reflects our age group and we have an idea of what interests teenagers and those of a younger age group.

We will also be targetting the social status of these teenagers from the C1 to E categories. We chose this as we took education into consideration, youths are likely to be still in some sort of education. This was also another aspect we took into consideration and schools, colleges and universities are such compact communities, it is more likely for our music trailer to become very popular in a short space of time.

I will be using Dyers Utopian Solutions Theory to motivate and engage our audience, offering the young target audience the "solutions" and "energy" through our music video. This theory gives the audience a sense of escapism and could encourage audiences who are suffering from exhaustion from every day-to-day life to feel energised and exhillarated, giving them another reason to watch. This theory relates to 10 key words; Inadequacy, Poverty, Confusion, Exhaustion, Isolation, Solution, Abundance, Clarity, Energy and Community.

A music video may offer energy through content and storyline which may be something like a party scene or a scene that builds up tension and an atmosphere, it may also be brought by special effects or camera movement/type. A music video tampers with the audience emotions but with the reasurrance with melody, tempo and bass. This enables us to create an unusual storyline which could oppose social norms relating to the lyrics.

I also looked at Maslow's Hierachy of Needs. This theory relates to these key themes; Safetey- offering assurance of safety, physically, emotionally and psychologically. Affiliation- the need to belong to a group. Esteem- the need to feel good about our selves. In the sense of a music video Maslow's hierachy of needs offeres originality and identity such as the listener/watcher feeling part of a community underneath the subheading of the R&B genre. Music videos build tension and atmosphere tampering with the audiences emotions through lyrics and different tempo's.

I will be using Graeme Burtons social grouping theory for target audience as he looks at; age, gender, social status, race, location etc. This is his first classification, his second classification consists of grouping media audiences via relationship with media, for example "concert goers", music listeners etc. I can then base my final identification socially or base it on my target audiences relationship with the media of which is two ideologies Burton promotes. Lastly, Hartley continues to narrow down social grouping; Aspirations- ambitious people? offer a motive such as performance enhancement and many other things such as style, cultural imperialism and social norms.

Target Audience Age: 16-22
Social Status- C1-E
Nationality- English (American+Britain)
All ethnicities
All Genders
Income- 0-18k