Audience

Audience

For your coursework- be absolutely sure of the following
• Who were your audience demographic?
• Who were your audience psychographic?
• What were the social classifications of the audience?
• How did your production appeal to this target audience?
• What uses and gratifications will the target audience get from the production?

• The key thing with audience is that in producing your music video you were trying to please an audience and appeal to an audience.
• It links to GENRE as you met certain genre conventions to appease an audience.

• When defining and working with your audiences you looked at both DEMOGRAPHCS (gender, gender, class etc) and PSYCHOGRAPHICS (attitudes, usage, fan level).

Theorists
Frankfurt School – Saw the media as a hypodermic syringe and the contents of the media are injected into the thoughts of the audience who accept this without question.
Gauntlett – Gauntlett argues that we need to recognise the changing media landscape in which the categories of 'audiences' and 'producers' blur together. He argues that there is a shift from a 'sit-back-and-be-told culture' to a 'making-and-doing culture'.
Mc Quails Uses and Gratifications – How audiences use their media – that audiences have specific needs and turn to the media to satisfy those needs.
Hall - encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience - the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code. However, by using recognised codes and conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of stars, the producers can position the audience and thus create a certain amount of agreement on what the code means. This is known as a preferred reading.
Blumler and Katz – television serves four needs:
Diversion – escaping from the pressures of every day.
Personal Relationships – where viewer gains companionship
Personal Identity – Viewer can compare their lives with those on television
Surveillance – Media supplies information about what is happening in the world.
Screen Theory – proposes that media texts address its intended audience in a particular way, establishing a relationship between the producer of the text and the media’s audience (e.g. music video artists addressing the audience correctly)
Horton and Wohl – Parasocial fans - … therefore you HAVE to know what your fans expect … but also bring new people into the genre.
Dyer - The music industry is well aware of the range of audiences it caters to. Stars represent shared cultural values and attitudes, and will promote a certain ideology. Audience interest in these values enhances their 'star quality'.
Stewart - The music video has the aesthetics of a TV commercial (focus on the star’s face). Stewart’s description of the music video as ‘incorporating, raiding and reconstructing’ is Intertextuality (using familiar thing to generate both nostalgic associations and new meanings). The video allows more access to the performer and the mise-en-scene, in particular, can be used to emphasise an aspirational lifestyle.
Hart - How can we study audiences without relying at one extreme on personal anecdotes or, at the other, on masses of indigestible figures?

Paragraph Example
When first appealing to audience, in music video we had to consider several levels of audience. We had to appeal to audiences who weren’t fans of the genre, which was where we deliberately chose physically attractive performers singing to the audience and included a straightforward chase narrative in conjuction with familiar visuals. However, we also incorporated Horton and Wohl’s parasocial theory in that we appealed fans of the band and genre by including references in the mise en scene to various props and items from other associated bands and performance (e.g a Rolling Stones poster).