Market Research

The purpose of my market research is to help me to construct a music video for a song which will achieve the most success, designated to a particular audience. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall argues in his encoding and decoding model that different characteristics appeal to different kinds of people based entirely on individual social, cultural and environmental factors which we cannot control. Any media text is encoded with meaning by the producer, then decoded by the individual members of the audience; their readings will differentiate depending on their age, gender, social/cultural background, political views, and the circumstances under which they exhibit the text. Accordingly, Hall argues that an audience member takes one of three possible readings to a text: preferred (agreement, enjoyment), negotiated (partial dislike/disagreement, but can understand and respect positive factors which can result in appreciating/enjoying the text) or oppositional (dislike, disagree, don't enjoy).

To collect this data, I have constructed a ten-question survey using the website 'Survey Monkey' which is a primary method of data collection using qualitative and quantitative data. My results are collated below.

This is a very general question conventional to all questionnaires. The majority of answers given in the questionnaire are female (55%) which gives the suggestion that if I use the information gathered, my construction will appeal to a female audience. Nevertheless, 35% of responses are male and 10% are other. It is quite a varied response, and especially if we consider Hall's reception theory we cannot state that gender is entirely influential on the reading gained from an audience. If any answers stand out in the rest of my survey questions, this means that that feature can be

deemed appealing to all genders, which is preferred as it means it will be enjoyed by a wide viewership.

In the same manner as gender, we must also consider the age of our audience as this is important when dealing with potentially difficult or explicit content and themes such as sex, drugs, and alcohol. 80% of the people who have answered my questionnaire are between 17 and 20 years old, and 5% in each other category. Using this, my target demographic will be around this age group,

with small influence from various other ages. Therefore, it is likely that they will want to see more complication and unorthodox ideas.

In a survey of 20 people, a quarter of those asked have little or no care for music videos that accompany songs. However, 35% said they are interested in watching the music videos to their favourite songs, and 40% responded 'sometimes'. This means that the interest in a music video is dependent on the intended audience and the video itself. For instance, on YouTube Miley Cyrus' music video for the song 'Wrecking Ball' has over 800 million views, whereas the majority have an average of 4 million. This is because the 'Wrecking Ball' video was particularly

striking and erupted with an outcry from people on social media with various different readings. If anything can be drawn from this survey result, it's that for a music video to interest people, it should be interestingly creative or striking. This will make more people want to watch it.

There are three main types of music video. These are performance, abstract, and narrative based. However, these can branch out into other styles. An example of this is the video accompanying 'Love Me' by The 1975. This piece is a parody of the culture and generation which has shaped the artist, Matty Healy, into who he is today. In interview with the magazine NME, he states "of course I'm taking the piss out of myself for a certain amount of it for allowing myself to get here... I'm not even taking the piss out of anything, I'm just making an observation on the glaringly obvious superficial elements that surround my life and the kind of culture that I feed into." This, if categorised, would classify as metaphorical or abstract. 'Love Me' also branches into the post World War II movement in art and media, postmodernism. The increasing dominance of postmodernism in the media is now arguably a category in itself, fuelled by pop culture references, parody, and reflexive self-awareness. The results of my survey regarding preferred style of video vary greatly. With a small preference for those which are abstract and feature performance, from this I believe the style of my video will make little difference to the size of its audience.

Every single music video has one dominant feature which inspires all of its features, this is the song which it is based upon. Some videos are tied closely to the lyrics of the song, others are more complicated and are harder to understand; as the British philosopher Steve Neale says: "genres are instances of repetition and difference." If graphed, it is likely that you

would find a correlation between the genre of the song and the style of the video. When asked what genres people tend to prefer in a multiple choice question, 65% of people said

both Rock and Indie music, with some taste for other genres such as Eletcronic, Blues, and Rap.

Indie and Rock music videos tend to have a more complicated style. Where generic pop songs linked to one of the Big Three record labels (Warner Bros, Universal, and Sony) often follow a conventional romance narrative, the style for indie and rock videos is usually performance based or conceptual.

Nevertheless, this is not always true for indie videos, but must be taken into account. According to the

responses gathered to the question "What kind of style do you enjoy the most?" the twenty people who answered my video, although evidently prefer rock and indie music, have no particular preference with regards to style. In this way, I believe the success of my music video will not be dependent on the style but how cleverly it is employed and manipulated.

The large majority of people watch music videos on the popular streaming network, YouTube. In this way, I will upload my video to YouTube which will be a cheap and effective way of spreading my video to the public. The other most effective means is via Music TV Channels such as MTV, Viva, and 4Music. These are where videos feature after they have become popular by other means. Generally, artists (particularly artists from smaller independent record labels) post their music videos to YouTube and then share them via social media in the final stage of vertical integration.

The twenty people who answered the question 'what themes do you like to see explored in music videos?' all responded with varying answers. There is a strong variety to those collected, from adventure, to politics, to parody, and self-discovery, implying that the theme of the video is irrelevant. If the video is edited well using a strong song and style, it is likely that the theme makes little difference. On the contrary, if a video is unique and cleverly done, it has the potential to be successful.

The last few questions on my survey were more generic, and these are just to get a general feel on the general opinion of music videos amidst the census. The majority of those asked admit to watching music videos three to five times per week or less. If we take this to mean 3-5 different videos, the people asked must have a decent knowledge of how the most popular music videos work and therefore we can trust that their answers will be helpful to my production. Similarly, these

same people, in a majority, believe that the music video accompanying music sometimes plays a role in the success of music, and sometimes doesn't. It depends. If a video is very dramatic and makes a strong statement in some way or another, it will have an impact on the success of the song. As aforementioned, a paradigm of this is Miley Cyrus' 'Wrecking Ball'. This gained popularity due to Cyrus' recreation of her image as well as the representation of women, debatably a statement in the third wave of feminism of female empowerment, which others argue is completely sexualised. The popularity of t.A.T.u.'s 'All The Things She Said' is similar. Other examples include Psy's 'Gangnam Style', a piece of k-pop with a dramatic and bizarrely nonsensical dance routine accompanying, and Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'.

My final question was more personal and open. I requested each person answering my survey to name their favourite music video and why. The responses varied greatly. Some examples are:

"Ed Sheeran's Photograph - because it tells a story, it's adorable and it shows what having an interest from an early age can do if you also have the determination to get there."

"Joy Division: Love Will Tear Us Apart. Stylistically the video has helped define the band's classic image, it's very evocative of Manchester at that time and it's just a great song!"

"The music video for 'Planetary (GO!)' by My Chemical Romance. I think it's energetic and fun to watch and it makes me as a member of the audience feel excited and more immersed in the music."

Evidently, people's tastes are entirely based on their own sense of self and how they receive the video (Stuart Hall's reception theory as aforementioned). Bringing all of the information from my survey together works as market research and will help me to construct my own music video.