Audience Theory

The intended effect of my coursework on my audience is to make them laugh and feel like they've not wasted their time after watching my music video. To create this effect I plan to have a fast moving video with lots of locations and humour to make sure the audience don't get bored. Not every teenager is going to want to be listening to the music we've chosen so me and my partner need to make sure that we tailor the video to the type of people that are going to watch it. They need to feel that we have done the music justice and got the message of the song through to the audience and anyone else who may view the video.


There is a media theorist called McQuail who believes that people consume certain media texts to fulfil their particular needs in life. I think that my audience will consume the text for their personal identity. They will use my video to find out about themselves and other teenagers and also see their own experiences in life reflected in my video for example teenage romances. 


In recent years media has taken a new turn creating media 2.0 where the audience can now respond and contribute to the media in a new way online. A theorist called Flew said that the internet allows media to be networked and compared with other media, meaning that the audience can contribute with content as well as consume it, for example mash up of songs and fan made music videos. Youtube is the main way videos are watched and passed around the world. To make a Youtube video a big hit and go viral you need to make something funny or something that people haven't seen before so it amazes them and makes them want to share it with others. 
Here are 2 videos I have shared with my friends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Pcdg9m7Dao&list=LLd5PLWIzgsvvZBUAOUp8xuw&index=4&feature=plpp_video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tcR19y7GPM&feature=plcp&context=C3ff94e7UDOEgsToPDskI8wmqKQPShrj_9ly3P0w33
To make this happen to my video it would have to contain humour and display really good editing skills that will make people think it is worth sharing. 


Another theorist Morley states that people who read your media text will read them in different ways taking a preferred, negotiated or oppositional reading. Hopefully my audience will take a preferred reading to my music video. It is aimed at teenagers and young people and contains them too so they are seeing people their age do things that they themselves would do. In our focus group they said the videos we showed them were good and that they would watch them so this hopefully means they will do the same with ours. However some of the audience may take an oppositional reading and disagree with the message that teenagers drink, smoke and sometimes get up to no good so they may reject these messages. 


According to the theorist Ang, audiencehood  is becoming more fragmented this is down to new technology which makes all sorts of media accessible to all sorts of people. We can watch anything we fancy at any given time if we so wish. Me and my partner aren't making our video for a very small niche market we are trying to aim for a wider audience which is a bit more mainstream in the way that people who don't even listen to the music will want to watch the video.