1b Audience

I am going to discuss the concept of audience in relation to my advanced portfolio, for which we created a music video for Jack Johnson’s acoustic rock song ‘Better Together’. We decided our target our music video for both genders between the ages of 18-28. This target audience was identified after researching the artist and going onto his official website. 

We wanted to attract a folk rock audience as the artist and song were from that genre. Therefore we looked at similar artists and their products to get an idea of the main conventions they had which established the genre successfully. Examples of artists we looked at were James Morrison, John Mayer and James Blunt. Some of their main conventions were that they performed with a guitar throughout their videos, many close-ups were used on the artist performing and each video has some sort of simple narrative in it. 

We also had to consider how the audience would read and react to our music video. When researching the artist we found that the artist is has a laid back character and enjoys his music and playing his instruments. He is also environmentally friendly, which we found when visiting his website. He minimalised the environmental impacts of his ‘To the Sea’ tour, by doing various activities such as selling eco-friendly merchandise and reducing the use of single plastic bottles used backstage while on his tour. Therefore we decided to encode messages of eco-friendliness in our video through the artist and mise-en-scene. This supports the theorist Stuart Hall who believes products can encode messages for the audience to decode in their own way. Messages we encoded were that the artist is not consumed by fame, which is a positive factor. We set our video in a natural environment, where the artist freely wanders around playing his guitar showing he is friendly toward the environment. 

However audiences have many ways of decoding messages, depending on how they read the text. This links to Denis McQuail’s ‘Uses and Gratifications’ theory, which states that audiences have many different ways of using texts whether it be for entertainment or whether they feel the text actually relates to them. Some of our audiences may have selected the messages of caring for the environment and not being consumed by fame and popularity. However viewers who have an oppositional reading may have just gained entertainment from watching the video or happiness from the meaning of the lyrics.

To conclude, we were able to create a music video for an active audience and would not have been able to do so without having researched the artist and the genre’s main conventions.