The Audience as "Mass"

The audience can be referred to as the “mass” because no matter where we are situated as audience, we will always receive the exact same information that the media is advertising. Nowadays, there is not a day that goes past without us encountering the media in some kind of form, whether it is in the form of the sound of the radio in the morning, passing billboards when walking down the street to watching a film in the evening.

The key ideas about media audiences that are very essential to take into consideration and remember are the facts that:

1) The media are often experienced by people alone. This can be looked upon in a way in which that people are cut off from other people like separate atoms.

2) Wherever the audience is in the world, the audience for a media text are all receiving exactly the same thing.

When looking at the early history of the media, it is fairly easy to see where the ideas of a mass audience came from. Within less than a hundred years photography, film, radio and television were all invented. Each one of them allowed works of art or pieces of entertainment that might once have been restricted to the number of people who could fit into an art gallery or a theatre to be transmitted in exactly the same form to enormous numbers of people in different parts of the world.

Herbert Blumer in 1950 (before Hitler in Germany attempted to use the media as propaganda) referred to the audience as being the mass in an anonymous group, and their membership may come from all walks of life and from all distinguishable social backgrounds from different cultures, vocation and wealth. Also, Blumer made it clear that the mass have very little interaction with one another as they are all physically separated.

Questionnaire Results

After I have collected the data from our dispersed questionnaires, I decided that it would be best to present the findings in an excel table to look at the comparisons and to illustrate the demographics.

Class

By analysing the chart it is clear to see that the majority of our target audience is mainly that of a middle class, hopefully this will not be effected by the class demographic.

Age of targetted audience

Due to the production teams decision making, our preferred genre is pop/rock, we wanted to show questionnaire results for our age range. We interviewed a range of people and came to the conclusion that the most popular age in which preferred pop/rock was people between the ages of 16-18. Therefore, it is clear to see that our target audience are going to be young, and of course teenagers.

Gender and Genre

I have come to the clear conclusion that females prefer the genre of pop/rock opposed to their counterparts. It is proved that 8 out of the 20 females preffered this genre whereas only 5 males preffered it.

Gender and preferred album cover

This was quite important as one of our ancillary tasks is to design a digipak.Our questionnaire highlighted that Mika's album proved most popular, but only with females. Whereas Groove Armada's was only popular with males.

Another music related theory...

Phillip Tagg suggests that the listeners are already able to create an image of what the music should look like through the semantic connections they hear created by the lyrics. As people react differently to music the image in each persons mind will vary. Therefore music videos could threaten the listener’s individuality and interpretive ability according to Will Straw. “the debate about whether or not the video images triumphs over the song itself needs to take account of where the emphasis lies in the visualisation, and whether or not it illustrates, amplifies or contradicts the meaning of the song” states Goodwin. Amplification adds layers of meaning, illustration tells the narrative of the story and contradiction uses images to contradict the songs narrative.

Our Initial Ideas and Chosen Song

The production team and I ended up choosing an uncopywrited song from the LGFL website called ‘Superman’ by Barrie Gleden. We thought that this song was suitable for our music video due to the captivating tune and the catchy lyrics. There was a hard decision between this song and another song, however we thought that this song would be much more appealing to our age range of audience, and it was an overall more upbeat tune. The song is about a girl trying to find her ‘Superman’; therefore she goes looking at different types of men. The group and I immediately came up with ideas of what to include in the music video which were very humorous and comical which made our narrative fun and exciting for all ages, therefore this was a good choice of song as our ideas were very open from all angles of the group.

Here is a rough outline of our initial ideas of what we could possibly include in the narrative of our music video. The acting of the characters is going to be much exaggerated to make it comical for our audience so it is more entertaining, which will result in it being more striking. This will also make the production of our music video more engaging for us as a production team.

- There is a girl who is looking for her ‘Superman’. So, she goes on various dates with a range of different guys whose style vary from gangster to punk to geek.
- The dates are all in the restaurant, however in each scene the guys change but the mise-en-scene stays the same so that it is easier for the audience to compare the differences in the guys.
- Obviously, the girl is going to choose the best looking guy, but as time goes on she begins to realise his egotistical attitude and his arrogance and eventually, she will come to realise that he does not even care about her!
- The geek is the boy that is hardly noticed, but as the music video will progress he will be noticed more and more and will slowly become better and better looking. He also really likes the girl, but as the girl does not give him a chance she does not realise this.
- After getting to know the good looking guy, the girl finally realises that she made the wrong decision. She notices the geeky guy and begins to really like him. She has recognised that he has gotten better looking over time which is what made her initially notice him.
- Lastly, she finally gets with her ‘Superman’.
- As a group, we thought that we could possibly have animation appearances in the music video to make the video appear slightly like a comic as the word ‘Superman’ is associated with comics generally. This will also reflective on the cartoon ‘Superman’ which is one of out initial ideas for this music video.

LGFL Audio Network Website

In today’s lesson, we accessed the LGFL Audio Network Website. We also discussed that making our own music on Garage Band would be too time consuming, as we could be using our time more wisely by trying to gain ideas for our music video. So we came to a final decision that we should choose a song from the LGFL Audio Network Website. We are only able to access this website from the school computers which was quite helpful because it helped us to choose a song as a group instead of my group members going off and doing their own thing as individuals. By doing this, it was easier to discuss as a group what songs would be most suitable for our genre by analysing the tempo, how fast the beat was, what the lyrics were and whether we were able to come up straight away with a set of ideas which could be used for our music video for this chosen song.
This website was relatively easy to use as everything was set out in a ‘user friendly’ layout and the genres of music were easily categorized into sub-genres making our chose song very specific. As a group, we all looked through the genre of Pop/Rock and chose a list of songs that we would possibly consider.

Investigating Our Specific Audience

From my research, I have realised that Pop music usually attracts the youthful audience because most Pop songs are catchy and from what my research says, consist of 'love lyrics' which helps this genre of music relate to the younger audience, especially as the majority of the time the Pop Star is around the same age for example, Taylor Swift, as she is a teenager herself. Pop music is very broad, which helps a range of different audiences to get involved in the liking of this particular music genre, this helps to converge with what my research explains about how Pop is a commercially friendly, marketable and memorable genre.

My group and I came to the conclusion that to make our music video suitable for our audience, we have to firstly find out who our specific target audience are. Therefore we made a questionnaire for 20 people to fill out on their own individually so we can get a rough idea as to what would be suitable to include in the production of our music video. The people who we will ask will be random, so that we can get a range of peoples opinions on what they prefer.

Pop - The Global Perspective

English is one of the most popular languages in the world, therefore Pop music can appeal across many areas of the world. This has given the UK and America a very strong presence in the Pop music industry. Also, as these two countries are quite rich, this helps music to be widely spread to other countries through different forms of technologies such as television, radio and internet.

The areas of the world which have quite a noticeable pop music genre domination is Western areas of the world such as the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, North America, South Africa possibly, and the majority of Europe.