Audience Research

Task 1- Demographics

Demographics:
-What are demographics?
Demographics is where people are placed into different social classes relating to gender, age, education, subcultures (social and cultural consumption) geographical location and lifestyle.

Social demographic table:

What types of music are stereotyped to each social demographic? Why?

-Area A consists of the upper middle class with professional jobs. This implies they are relatively older and mature, therefore they may listen to artists such as The Beatles as they may not be too keen on modern pop music. Furthermore, they may have listened to such artists when they were younger and will feel more drawn towards that type of music; depending on their age and when they were born. However, as this area could have both males and females of the ages 20+, they could still enjoy pop music and artists such as Taylor Swift and Rihanna. In addition, due to the more sex, drink and drug related lyrics in today's music, people in this social class may feel uncomfortable due to their older age listening to such lyrics, therefore they don't listen to pop/rap music as much. Although people in the upper middle class may listen to classical music as that is generally stereotyped towards 'rich' people as they are labeled as enjoying musical instruments such as piano's and acoustic guitars etc.

-Area B is middle class and this is relatively similar to area A. Middle class may enjoy a range of music genres, however maybe not songs with vulgar language and lyrics due to their maturity. For example, this music video called 'Or Nah' by The Weeknd would maybe not be appealing to this social area because of the sexual nature of the lyrics and video. However, this may not be the case and they may enjoy listening to a range of music genres such as the rap genre. 

-Area C1 is the lower middle class and again what was said for area's A and B can apply to area C1. They may be more socially aware of the trends of music and will enjoy listening to today's artists from a range of different music genres.

-Area C2 is the skilled working class and similar to area C1 they may be more socially aware of the genres of music that is more up to date and will have the technology to listen to these music. 

-Area D is the working class and this could start from the age of 16, therefore the genre of music will be younger artists and more known genres of music such as pop, rap, indie rock, electronic dance music (EDM) They may be more in touch with music via the use of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook in which they can find new artists to consume. Furthermore, they may even subscribe to music services such as Spotify and Deezer to keep up to date with music.

-Area E is the casual/lowest grade workers and they may not be able to connect to new music as much as the other classes can, perhaps due to their poor pay (they may not have access to technology like phones, laptops, in order to consume the music they want.) 

Task 2- Institution Profile

Task 3- Questionnaires: My survey:

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/PZSRK5P

Responses from my survey:

1:

 From this response to my questions I can see that the person will perhaps fit into the D social demographic area due to the fact they're only 17 years of age. They may have a job of their own at his age, however they won't have a lot of money due to them still being in education and still living at home. Their gender is female and their preferred music genre is pop. I am not surprised by this response because lots of females enjoy listening to pop music and this verifies the point that pop music is a well dominated genre within the music industry. She would rather just listen to the song than watch the music video, which could mean she listens to music purely for the lyrics and not for visual pleasure, perhaps when doing other things such as work she will listen to music instead of watching it. She says she watches music videos via streaming on YouTube and I definitely expected this response as YouTube is one of the top streaming sites people turn to in order to consume music and other media products. This also emphasizes the social group they are in, as they may not be able to afford to waste their money on purchasing music when they can simply get it for free.

She buys physical copies of music which shows she'd rather be able to physically interact with what she's buying. She only listens to music videos a couple of times a week which suggests she isn't too bothered about viewing the music, but listening to it instead. In pop music videos she expects to see artists, different props/locations and bright colours and this clearly shows that she knows the typical conventions of music videos and through the mise en scene she can verify what genre it is. Her favorite artist is Ed Sheeran because she likes his music in general and this is a very popular artist among the pop genre, as he is very well known and featured in various media such as magazines, radio and social media. She may follow him and interact with him on social media to keep up with his new music and find other music she enjoys listening to because she uses the 3 big social media sites, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Overall, these results are what I expected from a 17 year old female as they appear to stick to the stereotypes of what music a teenage girl likes to listen to.