In order to determine our target audience, we created a questionnaire to allow us to gather information about who would be most likely to watch a folk music video. This will allow us to target an audience who actually would like a folk music video and will help is to decide what key aspects they would like to see within the video. The photograph below shows the questions that we asked.
After having given out questionnaires to a small range of people, we collected the results and analysed them in order to determine our target audience. The following photos show some of the best questionnaire responses we received.
One of our main overall findings was that it became obvious that a lot of people seem confuse folk music with country music. This will create issues for us overall as some of the questionnaires had to be discounted from the statistics. However, we still have a few good questionnaires that give us an idea of what we need to include in our video and what the audience expect.
Question 1: Gender
When questioning people we could potentially choose to be our potential audience, we ensured that we asked an equal number of males and females to see whether differing genders would create contrasting ideas and preferences. This is not as evident in our results as we thought it would be, meaning that we can target both genders with our music video.
Question 2: Age
90% of the people we questioned were between 16 and 19 years old. This makes it seem like it would be most sensible to target an age range similar to this as we are now aware of what this particular age group are expecting to see within a music video, whereas we still wouldn't know about the expectations of older adults.Question 3: Religion
Within our extremely selective sample, we received a wide variety of answers about their religion including Hindu, Christian and Agnostic. Due to this, we have decided to ensure that our video is suitable for all religions and remains good natured and non-conforming so to prevent offending any particular individuals.
Question 4: Do they listen to folk?
Only 50% of people from within our sample said that they listened to folk music. This was interesting as it meant that many of the other answers that we would receive would be uninformed and would simply be stemming from the individual's personal ideals, rather than as a reflection of what they have already seen.
Question 5: Do they enjoy folk?
Of the 50% of people who listened to folk music, 100% of them said that they enjoyed the music and each person gave a very different reason behind this. We found this interesting as it brought to our attention the diversity of the genre. Some of the reasons we were given included "Live folk is very warming and enjoyable", "I love the chords" and "It's very lyric based - I'm all about that".
Question 6: Favourite folk artist?
Again, from the people who said that they listened to folk, we received a wide variety of answers to who their favourite artists were. Some of these included Frank Turner, Mountain Goats, Jake Bugg and Bon Iver. This will help us when it comes to making our music video as we can use this information to determine some aspects of what they would expect from a folk music video that they may not have specified due to the music videos made by these artists.
Question 7: Where do you find new folk music?
The most popular answer to this question was through YouTube which was the answer we were expecting as it is the most popular music and video streaming website. However, some other examples of music software were also mentioned, including Spotify and Soundcloud. This indicates the importance of the music video as it appears to be more successful in helping to distribute the video than merely the music alone. Interestingly, 2 of the people asked also mentioned that they find out about new folk music through magazines. This ties in well with our ancillary task and has caused us to fully understand the importance of the magazine advertisement in conjunction with the music video.
Question 8: Where do you watch folk music videos?
The majority of our target audience listen to folk music through YouTube. This is reflective of where they find new folk music which shows that people stick to what they know and therefore when creating our music video we must remain aware that the highest chance of having our video seen would be by having it available on the YouTube platform.
Question 9: Common folk album cover conventions
The responses to this question were extremely vast and this will become extremely helpful when it comes to creating our digipak and magazine advertisement. Some of the ideas presented were guitars, images of the artist, bright colours, country landscapes and a vintage style. These are aspects which have already been brought to our attention upon researching the genre and therefore it has been reassuring to see that this is what is expected from a potential audience. We shall therefore employ most, if not all, of these aspects within our digipak.
Question 10: Common folk music video conventions
The most common convention that was mentioned within our results was the inclusion of guitars. This is unsurprising due to their dominance within the genre. It is uncommon for a folk song to have been written without a guitar. However, this makes it very clear that we should include clips of our artist playing guitar within our music video to reflect this.
Question 11: Artist Prevalence
The majority of the people we asked said that they would expect and like to see the artist present within the video. We believe that this is because folk music videos tend to have much lower budgets than most other music videos and therefore it isn't possibly to hire actors for the videos. Not only this, but it allows the videos to appear more personal and down-to-earth which is reflective of the tone of the genre. We shall therefore mirror this within our video in order to allow for a better reflection of the genre.
Question 12: Most important aspect
40% of people questioned said that they believed the narrative to be the most important aspect of the video whilst a further 30% believe that the most important aspect of the video is in fact the music itself. This has made us aware that the narrative of the video needs to be extremely strong in order to allow our music video to be the best that it can be for the song. In order to do this, we must ensure that people understand the planned narrative throughout the entire process of our creating the music video.
Question 13: Purchasing CD's of Vinyls
Out of the 10 people questioned, only 2 people said that they would buy an album and even in this instance, they both said that they would only buy the album if they knew that the music on the album was of a high quality and would be worth the money. This can be put down to the rising prices of both digital downloads and physical copies of albums. This information has allowed us to understand that whilst a beautifully designed digipak may catch the audiences attention, it is unlikely to be enough on it's own to make someone buy the album. This is a stereotypical response that we aim to dissipate, by creating a digipak so aesthetically pleasing and true to the music that an audience member would consider buying the album before hearing the music.
Question 14: Downloads
Three people stated that they had folk music downloaded onto an electronic device, including one who had 16 different albums on their phone. One other person stated that they didn't like to listen to music on their phone but instead owned physical copies of folk albums. The remainder of the people replied by saying that they do not and it can only be assumed that this means that their sole method of accessing the music is through platforms such as YouTube. This has allowed us to understand even further the importance of the music video as it appears that this is the most common way that people access and view folk music videos.
From this, we have decided to target our music video at both males and females in order to allow us to gain a wider potential audience. However, we will also target our video at young adults between the ages of 15 and 21 to ensure that the video is suitable for the age range which are most familiar with the genre. We plan to ensure that our video is suitable for all religions and remains good natured and non-conforming so as to prevent it from offending any particular individuals. Some of the people we asked said that they expected to see guitars, images of the artist, bright colours, country landscapes and a vintage style present in the digipak and therefore to ensure a connection between the products, these images shall also be included within the video. In order to establish a better reflection of the genre we plan on ensuring that the artist is prevalent throughout the video and creating a strong narrative that the audience can easily follow.
Posted by Sam Skinner and Olivia Calver
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