ARTIST RESEARCH

A big part of this looking for any media appearances, which I've covered before. This is just a quick guide to the topics/themes you should explore - ideally before your main shoots commence. For eval Q1 (and potentially aspects of exam Q1A/1B) it is important to be crystal clear on which 'conventions' (think branding too) you followed, and which you challenged (and why, of course!).

KEY AREAS OF RESEARCH

BRIEF HISTORY incl. DISCOGRAPHY  + CHART STATUS + (SUB-)GENRE/S 
RECORD LABEL/S (eg UK, US)
SOCIAL MEDIA, STREAMING (+ AUDIENCE)
MEDIA APPEARANCES (+ AUDIENCE)
EXISTING TEXTS: VIDS, DIGIPAK, WEBSITE, MERCH
BRAND/IMAGE SUMMARY + POSSIBLE INFLUENCES

BRIEF HISTORY incl. DISCOGRAPHY  + CHART STATUS + (SUB-)GENRE/S
Don't fall into the common trap of a pointlessly lengthy bio, a too common website 'feature' in the Wiki era. Keep it pithy! Do include their discography (Wiki screenshot/s are fine) + not just facts on their charts record but commentary/assessment on this. Is your promo package likely to be hitting a mainstream audience? Is there a pattern of appeal in any particular market/s (ie country/ies)? Any key line-up changes?
Remember you'll likely want to feature some or all of their album discography in your website (linked to DL/streaming).
It should be obvious that correctly stating their genre(s) is key, but its not always easy - and certainly DON'T rely on Wiki for that!!! They might have mixed multiple genres over time, or be defined as hybrid act. Whichever genre(s) you identify as pertinent you'll need some (not necessarily huge detail on every one!) research into notable conventions, especially visual/image. You could use genre chart; Spotify tagging, article quotes etc as evidence.

SUBCULTURE heavy metal community values

http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/study-heavy-metal-music-is-inclusive-and-governed-by-rules-of-etiquette/

VINYL AUDIENCE half left unplayed, core 25+ audience

When discussing industry changes and practices you need to be precise - give figures, provide quotes from informed industry/academic figures, details from reports/surveys, and make a clear link into audience habits ...

This article is a good example of precisely the sort of research material you should be accessing, blogging on, and reflecting ('applying') within your evaluation (and potentially exam Q1a/1b too).

SAMPLE SECTION FROM ARTICLE:

Read full article here.

CIE Eval Q3a AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT

CIE Evaluation Q3 asks:

How do your products engage with the audience and how would they be distributed as real media products?

This ('3a') is similar to the UK OCR Eval Q3, which looks at the narrower issue of audience feedback - but in practice is essentially an overview of engagement with the audience.

KEY POINTS:

• provide a very clear, specific breakdown of your primary and secondary target audiences
• screenshots from blog posts/links lists are useful to help hammer home you are APPLYING research (assuming you have!)
• set out the web 2.0 framework: how has digitisation changed the way artists engage with audiences? If you're covering this is more detail for another answer, say so but give a brief summary
• consider the mode of address of your texts: direct gaze to camera? use of I/we/you/us in any writing? direct invite to interact with the artist? the look (branding) of costume, choice of locations: distant/ultra-glamorous or humble/relatable (maybe a mix)? implied representation of audience in the video or elsewhere? intertextuality?
• did you include a viral element in the digipak and website? (you really, really should) discuss in detail if so
• website and social media: how widely did you exploit modern tools to engage with the audience and how - include plentiful examples, and detail any branding involved. audience feedback? research or feedback on early ideas? use fansites? Facebook groups? Twitter/Instagram hashtags?
• IF you got any responses (the 2015 A2 Lady Gaga is a great example - they ended with 100s of followers) were these useful, productive? SHOULD artists be close to audiences or maintain more of a mystique?
• sum up: did you engage successfully/as well as you might? is there anything you can now say you should have done?

UK EQUIVALENT STUDENT ANSWERS
CIE Q3b is fairly similar to the OCR (UK) Q3. Here are some examples:

compare the thoroughness of links lists with yours...

Kate (see below) smartly made sure her understanding of points linked to other answers would be credited

Amber: popstar/Madonna clone Lady Gaga 
This isn't so well presented, and would clearly benefit from more substantial engagement with audience theory, but is especially useful as an example of depth of engagement with audiences. This production partnership (here's Conal's) made extensive use of social media, attracting a sizeable following, dipped into fancies, and took every opportunity to test out their work with a variety of audiences, consistently noting the response and their thoughts and consequent planned actions.

WEB 2.0 Madonna adds Meerkat to promo campaign

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the big 3 of social media (as of April 2016 anyway..) - there are many more significant options boiling away just below mainstream radar ... and chances are Madonna will be on it!

There's another point here - social media has not REPLACED artist websites, but rather taken a complementary position: social media content is all over such websites. In this case the video premiere is jointly through Madonna's website and the Meerkat app.

You can question the usefulness of relatively obscure social media, but there are benefits...

1. New or lesser social media will make more effort to push content from stars that could get lost in the noise of larger rivals like Twitter
2. It makes for good branding - older star at the cutting edge, with tech early adopters being younger, so helping such artists to refresh their audience base
3. Of course, it can also invite ridicule!

Hyperlink below the line

INDUSTRY Universal acclaim down to marketing spend

A truly angry article, packed with useful detail on the monopolised music industry and how the biggest player, Universal, used its vast resources to seal influential critic awards.

A sample quote:

Add in similar costs for a TV and radio plugger, to get the music aired in public and make voters feel that said act really is the kind of label priority worth voting for, and the same again for an online marketing team to make things appear “viral” and “organic”, and you will be lucky to get much change out of £100,000. Labels say that the cost of developing and launching a new mainstream pop act today can be anywhere between £500,000 and £1m. With winning the tastemaker polls seen as the blue chip moment in a launch campaign, it’s clear why an increasing number of chips from a decreasing number of bettors are being stacked on the side of the BBC’s roulette wheel.

ARTICLE: How do you become music's next big thing? You hope your record label will spend, spend, spend.

WEBSITE Doors bundle t-shirts and vinyl with Light My Fire re-release

IN THIS POST: Discussion of a heritage (60s/70s) band's use of merchandise and social media; analysis of their website including detailed denotation of the features, with screenshots, and a look at their social media integration and audience interaction (or lack of...).

This isn't The Doors' main website (though that is linked, and everything here IS featured and sold through their website too), but an online retailer that sells their merchandise, and markets this (I came across this via a Facebook update of the official Doors page, screenshot below the line). 

This is a further sign or evidence of the re-emergence of vinyl, plus the centrality of merchandise (especially when touring isn't an option) to monetise music.

below - analysis on assessing target audience (core/primary and secondary) + more images + detailed analysis of their website...

Blogging on AUDIENCE

I'LL UPDATE THIS THROUGH THE NEW SAMPLE BLOG TIME PERMITTING...

I've covered aspects of this in many posts - use the Q3 links list, and look at past egs linked in Q3 guide for example; try a search, or use the tags cloud!
A complementary guide, including a Word doc with step-by instructions, is available here.
You can also access PowerPoints on audience theory here, and links to other audience-related posts on the ProdEval blog here. 
This 2015 A2 example is a good reference point: you can see a video questionnaire, and this being delivered to a class, teachers etc, as well as audience feedback on rough cuts etc.
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This post looks at one of the better examples from 2012 and considers any issues that prevent it from being assessed as excellent (criteria: 'research into a similar target audience')

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AUDIENCE: YouGov survey on fans' demographics

Conal cites this in his vodcast.

With thanks to Conal (who spotted this through Twitter and Instagram accounts/feeds linked to his joint Lady Gaga production before I heard about it through reading the Guardian report the next day!), here's a really useful resource for adding some detail to audience research.
Magazine publishers' audience profiles are more accurate, if not always so detailed as this, but the YouGov data, which takes in some major artists as well as covering a variety of media (such as newspaper readerships), is certainly worth a look.

I do question its validity/accuracy though ... are Lady Gaga fans really primarily 40/50-somethings?! The samples can be quite small ... as an Adam Ant fan, for example, I can't say as I recognised myself in the profile thrown up! (FYI YouGov, I'm not a S*n reader!)

The media tab of YouGov's demographic profile of Lady Gaga fans ... apparently older, right-wing S*n readers?!

Richard Dyer's star system

This is a simple but highly useful audience/narrative theory, which also reflects standard marketing thinking (question 1 a potential distributor will ask of a film production: who's the star?). Richard Dyer's (Amazon book list) landmark 1979 book Stars argued that the star system was central to how the media operate, and how we read texts. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (his 1986 follow-up) used case studies of Hollywood icons from the golden era, examining 'the ways in which audiences simultaneously construct and consume a particular star's persona' (Wiki). You might see parallels here with much later web 2.0 theorists such as Gauntlett and Gillmor and such declarations as "the former audience" (see this post for associated material on this).

The point here is that your text's narrative extends well beyond the film opening, 4 minute video, or even the wider promotional package.

I thought about this when reading a Film Guardian feature on Tom Cruise and director Christopher Nolan's insistence on diegetic as opposed to CGI stunts:

It goes deeper still though, into the weird contract we draw up with ourselves when we watch film. “Tom Cruise is doing that for real!” we exclaim to ourselves as we see Tom Cruise doing some casual rappelling. “Whoa!” We never truly watch blockbusters as pure narratives, but instead are constantly aware in their place in a wider ecosystem of celebrity, in which Cruise also has divorces and jumps on sofas and twinkles next to fans. We’re in awe of Cruise-as-Hunt rather than Hunt himself. (Tom Cruise, Christopher Nolan, and the new anti-CGI snobbery)

The excellent MediaKnowItAll site has a useful entry on this, considering not just the film angle but also how the music industry inculcates this approach to its modes of operation:

A star is an image not a real person that is constructed (as any other aspect of fiction is) out of a range of materials (eg advertising, magazines etc as well as films [music]).  

Their entry is copied in below, but is best appreciated on their site, where you can also click around and find further useful material.

YOU/audience are the product: Julian Assange

When we consider audience theory in Media Studies, the degree of flux and changing views on this is quickly evident, and a major theme in itself. Which, if any, of the long-established audience theories continue to hold true in the digital age, the web 2.0 era? Is it enough to write of "the former audience", Dan Gillmor's (2011) striking phrase? David Gauntlett even went as far as to declare the "end of audience studies" (2007, 2011), although Julian McDougall's (2009, in a very readable, student-friendly book) more moderate point that audiences are fragmenting, making it more difficult to meaningfully analyse or discuss/define audiences, is perhaps more useful.

There are those who see the blurring of the audience/producer line as full of democratic promise, not least Gillmor, though Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture (2008) is perhaps the most striking statement of this.

Is Jenkins too utopian, optimistic? [image source]

Fanbase not Audience the future say YouTube

Various web 2.0 theorists have signified the end of the old analogue/early digital producer-consumer paradigm through such bold statements as "the former audience" ... now one YouTube's top honchos says we should abandon the very term audience, with its links to scheduled programming, and think in fanbase terms instead...
Simon Cowell and Disney are picked out as exemplars of the new more copyright-flexible order, in which UGC is seen as benefitting copyright-holders, not cannibalising their revenue streams.

“An audience tunes in when they're told to, a fanbase chooses when and what to watch,” said Carloss at the MIPTV television industry conference in Cannes. “An audience changes the channel when their show is over. A fanbase shares, it comments, it curates, it creates.”
...
He also praised Simon Cowell’s You Generation brand, a YouTube-focused global talent show, and Disney for the way it encouraged fans of its film Frozen to post their own cover versions of its songs on YouTube. One by musician Alex Boyé has been watched more than 30m times.
“The studio could have very easily issued copyright claims against this video and any others and taken them down, but they made a different choice: a fan-friendly choice. They chose to let those videos stay,” said Carloss, suggesting that the buzz around Frozen on YouTube contributed to its strong performance at the box office.
“Creators everywhere can make the choice Disney did. Allow fans to pay tribute, and you will see the incredible benefits of their passion.”

A lot of this closely echoes some of the arguments put forward by Anita Elberse (a Harvard economist) in her fascinating (a highly recommended read) book Blockbusters, published in December 2013.

Mag Ads - Basic Research Tips

TBC
This builds on the mag ad post from the top links list, plus the links list (look down the right-hand side), + various posts added since I last updated the mag ad post.
Scroll to end for an example of publisher info on a mag's audience.

BASIC STEPS:
1: You must have a clear, specific primary (and differentiated secondary) audience in mind. This should incorporate not just age range/s, but also gender, sexuality and any other relevant demographics/lifestyle factors
2: Research what UK magazines there are. You're looking for any genre-related titles, but also any more general titles that reflect your target audience/s. Consider which would be appropriate for primary and secondary audiences separately.
3: Use publisher sites or magazine sites to find descriptions of their readership; most provide detail on this (age range, social class, gender and lifestyle descriptors) as otherwise advertisers - including YOU!!! - wouldn't have confidence in spending money on placing ads which might not match up to that readership.
4: Try a hands-on browse in a WH Smith or equivalent!
5: Blog on your findings, making it clear which titles you'll target your primary and secondary audiences in and why you feel these are the most appropriate. Such evidence is useful for the Evaluation, but 'audience' is a key part of the R+P marks. If you do a vodcast, you can re-use this in your Evaluation.

Finding publishers' guides is easy!

6: Now research ad conventions. You must look at a reasonable number of egs and sum up what you've seen. Digipak ads ideally, but general album ads are also useful. You should note the growing prominence of tour dates, merchandise links, and social media links on such ads, being specific in your notes on what logos are used, how URLs are presented (do you still see/need the 'www.' in 2014?)
7: Sum up any specific IDEAS you've taken from this research, especially if you've found examples for your artist. You could also usefully list which conventions you aim to reflect.
8. Start blogging on your ideas, including basic dummy/mock-ups of these where possible (ie, adding a block with only 'tour dates' inside, or a box with 'CD track listing', but not actual details at this point), and highlighting images taken as part of this
9. Post drafts. Number these. Its vital you include somewhere clear and specific detail on how you think this will appeal to your particular target audience/s. Audience feedback needs to accompany each draft, with a summary of your response - remember, this is the topic of 1 of the 4 Eval Qs.
10. Links lists and proofreading: add relevant links lists, and simply check that you're happy each post is tidy, clear and multimedia (and that the published dates are appropriate/helpful).


EXAMPLES OF PUBLISHER'S AUDIENCE PROFILES

You need the media kit...

Mags need to have a clearly defined audience; advertisers (YOU!) need to know what sort of reader they can reach before spending money.

Take 2 simple examples: Glamour and Now magazines. I googled 'glamour uk magazine publisher' (without the UK, I was taken to the US site) and clicked through on the UK link (see screenshot above).

I clicked through the 'download media kit' - this is what they provide for advertising agencies, breaking down precisely who reads their magazine: see screenshot, left.

Here's a snippet from that 'media kit':

I also did a quick search for Now's publisher, which turned out to be IPC Media. Their website has a dropdown list of all their titles (as most do), which provided an idea to consider Nuts for a small (quarter page) ad targeting a secondary male audience for a girl band.

Here's a snippet of what they tell us:

DANCE EG: NG3 - The Anthem (2003); post-feminist?

Costume and lack of 'big hair' denote accessible; aud can identify with?

NG3 -

The Anthem.

Dir: unknown, 2003.

Eurodance/R+B.

Lyrics.

SUMMARY:

A simple video with a linear narrative, using movie signifiers (especially titles). Lyrically centred on women

Filmic titles are used

standing up to men and demanding respect, it can be read as hypocritical or assertive depending on whether or not you buy into the post-feminist position. Key to it, either way, is that the performers costume and appearance ensures that young F viewers could identify with the trio.

1ST SHOT (see screenshot above):

Fade up into a simple ML 3-shot, cut to the 1st beat of the track. The location is a 'grand' hall, but the 3 F performers are fairly plain in terms of clothing (leisure/sports wear) and general appearance - hair tied back rather than scaffolded using enough hairspray to euthanize the ozone layer.

Hysterical teen girl fans meme: Beatlemania to Beliebers + 1D

Lynskey considers psychological studies + historical comparisons

A brief one, but a post worth reading through as you seek to carefully consider the nature of audience, and the interaction between representations encoded by video producers and a fanbase.

Here's a sample from a lengthy article examining the history of the meme of hysterical - typically female - pop fans, with Beatlemania and today's Beliebers obvious examples (media coverage of the threats issued to any 1D 'haters' via social media also reflects this - scroll to bottom for examples):

Teenage girl fans are still patronised by the press today. As Grant says, "Teenage girls are perceived as a mindless horde: one huge, undifferentiated emerging hormone." In an influential 1992 essay, Fandom as Pathology, US academic Joli Jensen observed: "Fandom is seen as a psychological symptom of a presumed social dysfunction… Once fans are characterised as a deviant, they can be treated as disreputable, even dangerous 'others'."
"Lots of different fans are seen as strange," says Dr Ruth Deller, principal lecturer in media and communications at Sheffield Hallam University, who writes extensively about fan behaviour. "Some of that has to do with class: different pursuits are seen as more culturally valuable than others. Some of it has to do with gender. There's a whole range of cultural prejudices. One thing our society seems to value is moderation. Fandom represents excess and is therefore seen as negative."

Dorian Lynskey's article goes on to flag up that such behaviour - and the negative coverage of this - goes back much further than the Beatles in the 1960s:

Using INSTAGRAM to promote promos! (Britney, Rhianna etc)

Blogging, FB and Twitter are social/new media frequently mentioned here as tools used by artists/labels to boost acts'/videos profile and distribution.
Another useful site, heavily used by many artists, from the smallest Indie acts to global names, is Instagram...

On August 9, 2012, English musician Ellie Goulding came out with a new music video for her song "Anything Could Happen". The video only contained fan submitted Instagram photographs that used various Instagram filters to represent words or lyrics from the song^[63] and over 1200 different photographs were submitted. [Wiki]

Egs of initial MVid aud research

From students elsewhere, examples of the kind of initial primary research you could undertake to help inform your choice of act/idea etc...

Audience Research Analysis

View more PowerPoint from leannemokkba

Audience research analysis

View more PowerPoint from kbamedia

Media sightings + your aud

Caught a bit of BGT last night (yes, occasionally watch trash TV to keep up with things!) and caught a burst of ... the Girls Aloud cover of Jump! High-profile usage such as this is sooooo useful for helping to establish the genuine prospect of audience appeal (and in this case, given the 'family' nature of the show, for cross-generational appeal), along with radio plays, magazine features, use of music in ads etc

AUD Rock's for 40+ folk?!

With key 60s icons still singing their songs of youth and youthful rebellion but hitting their 70s, and even punk icons like the Pistols' Johnny Rotten at 56 (and a band Paul McCartney picks out as representing today's kids, the Foo Fighters, having an average age of 43.6), John Harris puts forward the argument on the Guardian Music blog that rock is for the over-40's! He backs this up by pointing to the now quarter-century growing dominance of hip-hop and associated forms; none of the current top 40 singles are rock. He also writes of switching from NME to Mojo for his rock news, the latter now overtaking Q (itself centred on a mature, sophisticated audience) as the UK's biggest selling music mag.

What do you think? Is rock music no longer 'for the kids'?!

Read the full article here; and see links list on nostalgia in music, plus various posts (THEORY TIP: see Simon Reynolds' book...)

Posts on AUD/FEEDBACK (Q3)

I've mostly skipped out posts on digipak/mag ad, which are listed in a separate post

http://musividz.blogspot.com/2012/02/new-media-band-blogs.html - Using blogs to reach fans
http://musividz.blogspot.com/2012/02/fundraising-online-old-man-cabbage-eg.html - Audience can be financiers!
http://musividz.blogspot.com/2012/02/mag-ad-research-audience.html