Planning: Audiences

In ensuring that any music video is a success, it is important to know and understand the audience better than we already do as a group, giving us a better insight, with key knowledge of audience expectations allowing for us to better our music video. And with that, we have considered it very important that our final media product has met the needs of the consumer, with the help of external research we are hoping this can be done. This may range from looking at a range of music videos similar to what we are trying to achieve. As a result of doing this research and collating the data, we hope to ensure our chosen song and artist matches what the audience wants to see and experience. 

Age, Gender and Ethnicity - Interests and Hobbies
After doing the research about our target audience and genre, we made it a requirement to understand the expectations the audience had on our music video. With the help of a questionnaire, were able to find out the following information on our target audience. 

• Although the target audience for Hip-Hop is males, both male and females enjoy and listen to this genre of music as it's modern message and style has taken a style that in turn has intention of appealing to a wider audience.
• The genre is popular amongst teens, as well as young adults and postgraduates, an age ranging between 18-32.

In addition with this key piece of information, we also found out more on the interests of our target audience, in order to assist with our research. With the constant exposure of violence and nudity to the media, it won't be a surprise if we added those elements and themes to our music video without it shocking the audience as they would have already been exposed to that touch of nature already, and with artists sharing their music through various platforms that are easily accessible for a young audience, it is more likely for them to be attracted by the thumbnail or first impression, based on artist or song title, making it easier to spread a message and gain the required attention from the target audience as initially intended.

Audience Reactions;

Audience Engagement – As our target audience will be reacting to our final media product, we have decided that there will be an age range of 12-19. This way we can analyse reactions and anticipate whether we will have the opportunity to expand our our final target audience. We believe that for the audience to engage with the final music video product, they will need to be able to relate, so things such as the artist dancing is a relatable subject as it draws upon the feeling to dance when listening to lively music. With the instance that within the music video there will be subcultures and also slight evidence of popular culture, we are hoping the audience will be able to feel the music while watching the video.

Audience Expectation – Having the ability to consider as a group what the expectations of our audience will most likely be, is a skill we have to engage with as majority of the audience will have various contrasting yet similar opinions on the music video. This could largely be down to various factors, may it be the gender, age, hobbies of the individual then so be it, and because Hip-hop is, and may carry on being an influential and mainstream genre, we will need to factor in conventional expectations as well to ensure our consumer is satisfied. 

Audience identification – According to Dyer's theory, an artist requires a type of image to be portrayed as ordinary, yet extraordinary to the public, something that will be taken into consideration. Before and after research, we proceeded with the group discussion of our audience, including their interests and tastes. With that knowledge we found a song, and then an artist suitable enough to portray the correct artist imagery we want for our music video.. 

Conclusion
With the conclusion of this research, we intend to take our finalised ideas and connect the missing dots using the research we have undergone to understand the difference between the needs and wants of the consumer, and media. To follow the audience expectations, yet still find a way to keep in touch with similar themes of the common conventions of this genre will be done using further information taken from this research. With the audience also being young and in the same bracket of our chosen target audience, we hope that we can take this and produce a final media product, with enough capacity to fit the bill.