Audience Theories
The two-step flow theory emphasises the importance of opinion leaders who exert a high degree of influence over mass media. These individuals traditionally include politicians, scholars and critics, and are influential because they can spread their personal interpretation of mass media to the wider public, thus altering the public’s perception of mass media and influencing public opinions concerning key issues. The specific process involve opinion leaders expressing their opinions to their fan bases, which then spreads the perspective to broader audiences.
Opinion leaders are characterised by their significant power over how audiences think and act. In the music industry, record labels establish partner relationships with influential individuals and platforms within the industry to leverage their influence, including social media influencers, bloggers and critics. For example, record labels could reach an agreement with the influential music critic platform Pitchfork to release a positive review on a new album released by the label’s artist. Since Pitchfork has a high degree of renown within the music industry, audiences will perceive their reviews to have a sense of authority, which increases the likelihood that the wider audience will stream or purchase the album and increases revenue for record label.
Another theory linked to targeting audiences in George Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory, which suggests that exposure to media plays a significant role in shaping audiences’ perception of social reality. In particular, media conglomerates can manipulate the attitudes and beliefs, which allows them to advertise products that align with consumer values, thus increasing the probability that audiences identify with the advertisement and purchase the product, which in the music industry mainly include albums and merchandise.
Audience Profile
Our music video is targeted towards a younger age demographic between mid-teen and mid-twenties. Since our actors are aged in the late-teens range, the music video would be most relatable to a similarly aged audience. Ethnicity-wise, the Asian cast of our music video makes it most likely to appeal to a predominantly Asian audience. Moreover, the music video should appeal to both male and female audiences because we plan to present both traditional and subversive gender representations. Considering that the lyrics involve a male actor talking about buying roses for ladies, the music video is more likely to appeal to a heterosexual audience. In terms of psychographics, this music video would appeal strongly to the ‘aspirer’, ‘mainstream’ and ‘struggler’ psychographics while also maintaining the interest of other psychographics except for ‘resigned’ groups.
Our primary audience would include individuals within the target demographic who are predominantly interested in the hip-hop music genre and consume hip-hop music on a regular basis. Having a strong interest in both the hip-hop genre and the jazz hip-hop subgenre, they would listen to both traditional hip-hop artists such as 2Pac and Dr.Dre, modern hip-hop artists such as Drake and Ye, and jazz hip-hop artists such as Nujabes. Our secondary audience consists of individuals who do not have a strong direct interest in hip-hop music but frequently interact with our primary audience, and are interested in related music genres such as pop and jazz, listening to artists such as John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong.
Our target demographic is relatively young, and would thus be most likely to engage in fan activity on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and TikTok.
Chinese audiences who do not have access to foreign social media platforms tend to use Weibo as their primary social platform used to follow artists. Platform wise, our demographic uses Spotify as their main method for music consumption. Similar demographics in China tend to use NetEase Cloud Music to consume music and engage with fan communities.