Evaluation

Evaluation

Overall, I found that we're targeting a mainstream audience who show more music interest towards the R&B/Pop crossover genre than anything else. The purpose of a target audience is to narrow down what specific conventions are needed in a music video depending on the genre and familiarity of the audience. It gives guidance to music video directors and artists as to how to appeal to their audience and meet their expectations of what they want to see from an artists music video.
Target audiences may also help make decisions as to whether a video should be performance based (which appears in quite a few Rap videos as well as Rock - the bands of artists in Rock are always present), narrative (which can be seen with the Pop genre, usually the visuals illustrate what is being said in the lyrics. A good example of this are music videos from Taylor Swift such as "Love Story" and "You Belong With Me") and also concept based which again appears with certain Pop artists such as Madonna and Lady Gaga, this base usually happens to include a lot of symbolism and metaphorical visuals. 

Since our artist is Rita Ora we could already establish her genre by listening to her debut album, as it is vital that artists make it clear what their signature 'sound' is when they first arrive in the music industry to help gain a steady following and widen their audience. The track we've selected is titled 'Roc The Life' and is unreleased which means we have the advantage of our own audience not having any presumptions about how the video should carry out and what conventions should be involved in it. However, for an up and coming artist Rita Ora is quite well known and very current which means we still have enough room to do artist research and look at her three very conventional music videos to released  singles of her to stimulate ideas and ways that we can be conventional to the R&B/Pop crossover genre.  
After looking at her two most popular music videos, 'How We Do' and 'R.I.P', we noticed that the conventions in each of them differ but somehow appeal to the same audience. That's how we realized that Rita Ora's target audience is a cross between young adult Pop fans and young adult R&B fans all ranging from around the ages of 18+.  
However, we never would have found this out without researching into our audience which stands as evidence as to why target audiences are so important when setting out to make a music video for a particular stars song to prevent the danger of making quick accusations and not backing them up with any form of independent research, as quite a lot of "generic" artists have tracks on their albums that differ from the rest of their usual sound. 
Examples of this are: 

• 'I Knew You Were Trouble' - Taylor Swift: She usually conforms to the genre of Country/Pop crossover but on her newest album 'Red', this track could be considered more dubstep. 
• 'Don't Judge Me' - Chris Brown: A lot of tracks on Chris Brown's latest album are close to the genre of Dance with some elements of R&B. However, 'Don't Judge Me' strips back a lot and relies on its deep lyrics and the traditional conventions of the R&B culture without any of the catchy hooks and loops that are present on other tracks of his. 

In our group we decided to use a questionnaire to find out more about our audience so that we could section them down into even more detail and make sure that we really know the types of people who'll be watching our video and the types of people we want to appeal to. 
Rita Ora is considered mainstream and is seen on a lot of music channels such as 4Music and MTV but that doesn't tell us much about our audiences interests because there are a lot of sub-cultures that come underneath just your average mainstream taste. I think that our music video will follow CCC's theory about sub-culture rooting from the mainstream as our track is initially fused from two different mainstream genres 'mainstream R&B' and 'mainstream Pop'. Whilst combining the two may create sub-culture conventions that aren't that familiar to either convention of their own, we've still taken our initial ideas from each of the cultures and fused them together to make something new and unique, steering away from the usual mainstream which I expect to find after researching into Rita Ora further. 

 For example, while Rita is considered mainstream and current, some could argue that she appeals more to an R&B/Pop or R&B/Dance culture rather than an audience who listen to what is classified as 'mainstream' music of just one genre. 
It's important to know which type of sub-cultures in particular are listening to an artists musics and consuming an artists videos because then it makes it easier to apply certain conventions of a genre to a video knowing what you're audience are looking for. This brings us back to the initial reason we carried out surveys and pie charts in order to make in more  clear to us about who we want to target and what we have to do to make sure we achieve that with our own videos. 
Going back to Rita Ora and her music videos, while she's not considered a pure R&B star in her videos R.I.P and Hot Right Now, there are a lot of characteristics that apply to the genre such as materialistic iconography and a setting considered "cool" and "chilled". 
As noted before, if I were to look at an artist who gives a different example of this it could be Taylor Swift; while she is also considered 'mainstream', she is a completely different artist to Rita Ora and that's because she appeals more to the Country/Pop audience rather than R&B/Pop making vast differences between the two stars even though the both have elements of Pop in their music and material. 

In total we surveyed about 40 people, since this is an educational project and not a professional project working for an actual company our sample size was quite small. If we were producing a music video for a big star such as Beyonce or a band like One Direction on an international level and wanted to research into our target audience, we'd probably ask more than one hundred people and use many different methods including tracking what frequent purchasers of the artists musics are listening to on technological music softwares such as YouTube's partner company 'Vevo', 'Spotify' and 'iTunes'. 
However, for the situation of our music video we felt 40 was a good number because it's even and rounded therefore we'll be able to split our research easily and pull out significant results that may affect us in the future (for example if a big percentage of our survey takers disagreed with a statement, we'd avoid whatever it is they said they didn't like to make our video more appealing to our target audience of young adults of both genders from around the age of 17-25). 
I think if we used any number under 40, such as 10 for example - our research wouldn't have been detailed or broad enough to give accurate results. Using an even number also allowed us to get the same amount of males and females so that we were getting a range of different opinions and not being biased. Counter to this, if our survey number was too big then we may have had too much irrelevant information which is time consuming to analyze and could cause us to overlook vital information which may of helped us out significantly when designing and producing our music video. 

 Besides our surveys we also went out during lesson time to do Vox Pops, these are short videos of us asking some of our survey takers questions from the actual survey and getting a visual response. On the whole I think that we were successful in picking a range of people with a range of tastes for our Vox Pops, that way we didn't have to worry about missing out any key information from someone with slightly different tastes which could've happened if everyone we interviewed was into the exact same type of music. 
Saying this I do think that we could've improved our Vox Pops by asking questions more specific to our artist like we did in the survey. This way the information we collected would be a lot more catered to what we want to find out and possibly more effective when it comes to story-boarding exactly how we want the final result to look. 

Three questions taken from our surveys 

1. What music channels do you watch? We asked this question as knowing the music channels people watch can tell you a lot about the genre of music they're into as found out from previous research on music channels earlier on my blog. For example, if one of our survey takers said that they watched a lot of Scuzz and Kerrang as oppose to 4Music and MTV, we could probably tell straight away that their not the target audience for an artist such as Rita Ora and probably wouldn't be able to tell us much about their opinions on the conventions of her video as oppose to someone who watched them on a regular basis. However, it's still worth surveying people who don't necessarily watch Pop/R&B based music channels because not everybody sticks to one genre and can still have an opinion on the sorts of things we want to find out which could benefit in the future. 
2. Who's your favorite artist from the Pop genre? This is important because as I pointed out earlier in my evaluation, not all Pop artists have the same kind of sound (the point about Taylor Swift and Rita Ora). Since the Pop genre is so broad and a lot of other sounds and genres have a lasting effect on it often manipulating the plain sound of Pop to create a crossover track, it's vital that we know which kind of Pop sound that our survey takers sway towards so we know why they're giving the answers that they have. Also, if it's clear from previous questions in the survey it's evident that the taker likes the Dance or R&B genre, finding out their favorite Pop artist may guide us in the right direction when looking for reoccurring  features in music videos of a similar style to the one that we're hoping to create. But we do have to bare in mind that for doing a music video to go along to one of Rita Ora's songs requires us to do more than just pay attention to Pop as she does take of a lot of other influences from different music and artists. 
3. Would you agree Rita Ora is a fusion of Pop, Dance and R&B? This question helps us clarify whether or not our assumptions of Rita Ora's music are backed up by other people because if the majority of people didn't agree then we could consider going back to our research and finding a more fitting genre to Rita's music so that we could put the correct conventions into our video. 

When we wrote our initial survey, we had a lot of questions such as 'Who is your favorite artist' and 'What is your favorite song?'. When it came to putting these into pie charts we realized that they weren't actually benefitting us for when it come to creating our music video. Due to this we went back to the survey and decided to alter the questions so that they were more suited to what we wanted to know, for example 'What is your favorite song' was changed into 'What is your favorite song from Rita Ora's album 'ORA'?' with a choice of some of the possible options that we were considering making our music video to - not only was this contributing to our music video but it also made our results more qualitative and easier to section into categories for our pie charts. 

Another thing that we've managed to pull from our research is that making our music video mostly performance based will probably appeal more to our target audience as "Roc The Life" is a mainstream track and it's very rare you see concept videos in the mainstream types of music unless it's heavily aimed at a certain sub-culture. 
However, considering the "star image" as well as the genre of the song our music video has potential to contain narrative as Rita Ora is a crossover artist. 

If we were to convey our video to an element of Dick Hebdige's Subculture theory, it'd probably be by breaking out of the way that mainstream music has a certain fashion where girls are always sexualized or in the case of Pop made to look extra-girly and flirty. Like Rita Ora, I think we'd appeal to an audience who're looking for something that goes against the conventions in the light that it unites all different types of styles and people which ultimately guides away from the mainstream but still has the same commercial features.