A2 Media Studies: 2014

Distinguishing The Heavy's Audience

I was able to distinguish the audience of the band The Heavy by using a range of research methods, using social media websites, online retail websites, online forums, and even by going to a concert of the band and observing the audience in real life.

When liking the band's Facebook page, a bar will pop up advertising other musician's pages similar to The Heavy. The musicians included here give a good idea as to what other music fans of The Heavy will listen to. All of these musicians here, including The Black Keys, Jack White and Gary Clark Jr are of the blues rock genre, just like The Heavy, and so they are all very likely to have a similar audience.

As for the size of their audience, judging from their number of fans on Facebook being close to 90,000 I would say that while they are not unknown, they are not incredibly famous. The Black Keys are considered rather well-known in mainstream media and they have over 1 million likes on Facebook. Most well-known bands will have well into the hundreds of thousands, showing that The Heavy are not quite mainstream. This means that their audience will probably be quite niche and people may have discovered the band in a range of ways.

The Heavy do not have as many fans on Twitter and YouTube as they do on Facebook, with only around 9,000 Twitter followers and 8,500 subscribers on YouTube. This tells me that most of their fanbase is present on Facebook than Twitter and YouTube. From this, I can theorise that most of their fanbase are of adults. Adults will tend to have a Facebook account and not a Twitter or YouTube accounts. Twitter is especially dominated by the youth of today and so it does not come across as very necessary to most adults.

I also decided that the band is most likely to attract a male audience as it is an all male band and their rock genre of music is very commonly appreciated by mainly male audiences.

I went to a concert of The Heavy in November and discovered that I was correct in my assumption of the audience being mainly male (there were however some females there, including myself, as the anomalies of my theory). However, I was surprised to see that there were people of all ages there. I expected it to be mainly adults, which there were, but there were also teenagers as well.

Collecting Audience Feedback

I used a range of methods to collect my audience feedback. I interviewed people and recorded it with either a video or an audio clip, I messaged people about it using social media sites, and finally I shared my music video online and received comments.

I got my classmates to give me feedback on m website design, digipak design and a rough cu of my final music video and recorded the results. I filmed a video of some feedback and recorded audio clips of others. Both methods effectively collected my feedback so that I could go back and listen to what was said and take it into account.

Before finishing the final cut of my music video, I collected feedback from my media teacher on my second rough cut to see if there were ways that I could improve it. She gave me some points on how to make it better and these included:

remove the jump cut sections as they are not consistent enough to give a distinct style throughout the whole video
remove or edit some of the focus pulls as they are too unfocused for too long
continuity error: it cuts from when the hero is sat on the stairs and hears someone coming, straight to the girl walking in the house by the stairs the hero was sat on. Need to fill that gap with footage of the hero quickly leaving the house before the girl walks in

What I've Learnt From My Feedback

I received a comment from one of my voice recording that said "I liked the way you created enigma with the character and didn't reveal it until near the end. This tells me that I achieved the effect of mystery that I wanted to create within my main character during the first half of my music video. I purposely hid his face for half the video to intrigue my audience and encourage them to focus on the video.

From the voice recorded feedback on my website and digipak, they said that I managed to "create continuity between the digipak and website really well". I ensured I did this by using my hand-drawn illustrations on both products and by sticking to the same monochromatic colour scheme.

This is my second rough cut. I edited my video further from my initial rough cut and came out with this. I have since had it looked at by my media teacher who has given me some pointers to improve my music video. These included:

remove the jump cut sections as they are not consistent enough to give a distinct style throughout the whole video
remove or edit some of the focus pulls as they are too unfocused for too long
continuity error: it cuts from when the hero is sat on the stairs and hears someone coming, straight to the girl walking in the house by the stairs the hero was sat on. Need to fill that gap with footage of the hero quickly leaving the house before the girl walks in

I will now fix my video according to these points and film the pick-up shots that I need to include.