Audience Essay

Most young listeners lean more towards pop-sounding music as it is the one genre of music that tends to dominate the charts and is more likely the type of music to be heard at any form of social gathering than say jazz or heavy metal, depending on the event’s theme of course.

Fans of other chosen genre of music, pop music, tend to be young, as it is a relatively new genre that only the current generation has had the chance to grow up with, whereas older audiences are engrained with older genres, such a rock, blues, jazz etc.

During the course of our research, we noted that pop music is extremely popular amongst younger audiences as evidenced by the videos on YouTube that display viewing figures in millions figures. Younger people are more likely to spend time watching videos on YouTube than older people would.

Younger people are very impressionable when it comes to new trends whether it be concerning films; fashion; video games; and most especially music as songs can be used as a form of escapism and helps listeners tap into their emotions. Years and Years’ synthpop ballad “Shine” became popular for a couple of reasons; 1) the listener(s) can resonate easily relate to its emotional lyrics; and 2) they can get caught up in its catchy beat and make them feel like dancing.

The idea was to make a music video that younger audience members would be able to relate to; it was for this reason why we made the decision of casting young actors as we felt younger audience members would be able to identify with the characters much more easily. An example of connecting with the audience was by showing that not all relationships are perfect and some ultimately don’t work out in the end.

Communication theorist Denis McQuail has stated that audiences will watch any form of media text, even as a way to kill time. This isn’t to say that audiences would be quite passive upon viewing our video as I believe that they can enjoy it for the visual representation that we have provided and for adding some new to an already popular song.

           

Also worth noting, is how Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding applies to our video as we encoded our video as the story of a young man trying move on having discovered his girlfriend has been unfaithful. However, it may be decoded by audiences as the story being about a boy who regrets whatever he did wrong that resulted in the girlfriend’s infidelity.