Audiences

I think the main audience that would be interested in watching the music video are obviously going to be people who like modern dance music. Making a music video is risky as it needs to portray the music in a positive light but also needs to appeal to the correct audience, needs to use conventions of that particular genre of music and also needs to be a successful marketing tool as music videos can determine whether a song is going to be a hit or not. Basically if you are intrigued by the music video you will want to own the song. Keeping to conventions is very important as well as people who know the song will be expecting certain conventions of dance music videos to be used in the music video. E.g. They will not be expecting to see someone head banging with a punk hairstyle on a guitar, or someone laid down mouthing along to the song looking depressed as the music does not go with this at all and it would not be a convention. If the convention is broke there are two things that could happen: The audience could love the new idea, or they could really hate it and be disappointed. Therefore it is easier and less risky not to go against the conventions as you are then pleasing the audience easily as they will be expecting the music video to include things they recognise in other dance music videos. The hard thing to master in creating dance music videos is to create a video that has sex appeal but is not too sexy as younger audiences may not understand it and parents of younger audiences may complain as it would be setting a bad example to younger people it it had, for example, a woman wearing just a bikini in the street. The setting is very important in this as you would not expect a woman to be wearing this in the street and would be seen as unacceptable but on a beach it is expected and therefore a totally different matter. So really the key is to create a music video which appeals to a younger audience, which will be particulaly important as people of this age are very influential and will possibly copy the fashion and personalities of attractive people they admire, but it also needs to have certain elements that appeal to an older audience.

To define my target audience I will create a questionnaire including questions about genres of music, dance music and specific artists. I will post this questionnaire onto a dance/clubbing website for under 17 year olds, as this will give me answers from the possible younger audience, I will give it to people around college and email it to people of around this age to give me answers from the mid-range the video may be aimed at and I will also email it to people who are slightly older, up to the age of around 25/26. All of the people will be from various background and have various interests as I can possibly determine what kind of people my target audience will be.