Audience Theory

An audience is a group of people who receive a media text, they receive these texts through a variety of mediums including through televison, internet, radio, DVD and Magazines. For our audience watching our music video, they would receive these through Youtube and Music Channels such as 4Music as this particularly  and MTV, MTV for its high status as a music channel and 4Music due to its pop based features which our video would be shown on.

Audience is a key concept throughout media studies, because all media texts are produced with an audience in mind-that is to say a group of people who will recieve the text and make some sort of interpretation of it. For our music video we have targeted a young female audience as both artists featured, us,  are young females which might make a younger audience see us as perhaps role models. We have very youthful playful locations too such as the beach, the arcade and playing in the snow which we feel would attract this type of audience.

Demographics

A common and traditional method of audience research is known as demographics. This defines the adult population largely by the work they do. It breaks the population down into 6 groups, and labels them by using a letter code to describe the income and status of the members of each group.

A- Higher management, bankers, lawyers, doctors and other professionals

B- Middle management, teachers, creative and media people eg graphic designers

C1- Office supervisors, junior managers, nurses, specialist clerical staff

C2- Skilled ,amual workers, plumbers, builders

D- Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers

E- Unemployed, students, pensioners, casual workers

I think we are mainly targeting group E as this group includes students however I think creative media people in group B may also be attracted to our video.

This audience demographics are based on the National Readership Survey's socio-economic grades http://www.nrs.co.uk/


Hierarchy of Needs- Maslow

Maslow's theory suggests that we as individuals have basic needs, for example the basic needs to eat and sleep up to a higher level of needs such as self esteem and self respect. This theory is very relevant to advertisers, and institutions that carry advertising in for example newspapers, cinema, television and radio channels.

Marslow's upper leverls at the top of the pyramid are about self esteem and gaining the respect of others. This can be linked to the idea that consuming particular media texts fulfils self esteem, as does buying certain products.

Cultivation Theory

This theory treats the audience as passive. Its suggests that repeated exposure to the same message, such as advertisement, will have an effect on the audience's attitudes and values. A similar idea is known as de-sensitation which suggests that long term exposure to violent media makes the audience less likey to be shocked by violence. Being less shocked by violence the audience may be more likely to behave violently.

This can be applied to our music video in the sense that people are now getting used to the fact that girls can be strong and wont sit around crying because of their boyfriends. Women being dominant and strong is being shown more and more regularly, for example Beyonce's video of 'who rules the world..girls'.

Two Step Flow Theory

Katz and Lazarsfield assumes a slightly more active audience. It suggests media messages move in two ways;

-Individuals who are opinion leaders receive messages from the media and pass on their own interpreatations
- The audience mediate the information receieved directly from the media, with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process but by a two step flow.

This theory relates to our music video as with sites such as Twitter, You Tube and facebook trends are easily made with people discussing a text/product and forming a strong opinion on something which may then influence other peoples opinions.
 

Stuart Hall's Theory (Research)

Stuart Hall (born 3 February 1932, Kingston, Jamaica, then a British colony) is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall's work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies, taking a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language-use as operating within a framework of power, institutions and politics/economics. This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time. (Hegemony, in Gramscian theory, refers to the cultural production of 'consent' as opposed to 'coercion'.)

For Hall, culture is not something to simply appreciate or study, but a "critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled."

Hall has become one of the main proponents of reception theory, and developed Hall's Theory of encoding and decoding. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on part of the audience. This means that the audience does not simply passively accept a text — social control. Crime statistics, in Hall's view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes. Moral panics (e.g. over mugging) could thereby be ignited in order to create public support for the need to "police the crisis." The media play a central role in the "social production of news" in order to reap the rewards of lurid crime stories.

His works — such as studies showing the link between racial prejudice and media — have a reputation as influential, and serve as important foundational texts for contemporary cultural studies.

Hall has also widely discussed notions of cultural identity, race and ethnicity, particularly in the creation of the politics of Black diasporic identities. Hall believes identity to be affected by history and culture, rather than a finished product, he sees it as ongoing production.

Andrew Goodwin Theory

Andrew Goodwin Theory

Andrew Goodwin has identified a number of key features in music videos. They are:

- A relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics.
- A relationship between the music and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the music.
- Genre-related style and iconography present.
- Multiple close-ups of the main artist or vocalist.
- Voyeurism often plays a major part, especially in relation to females.
- Intertextual references to other media texts may be present.

He says that music videos are often constructed by the link between the visuals and the song plus the artist. Relationships are built between these in the video, and the close-ups of the artists gives them the representation and publicity they require. Voyeurism is used to increase the video’s attractiveness, particularly to males, whilst intertextuality is often employed in humorous videos.

Many of these features are present in all music videos, depending on the genre of the song and the aim of the record company/artist.

Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position.

The gaze is characterised by who is the gazer (viewer):

• The spectator's gaze: that of the spectator viewing the text, i.e. the reader(s) of the text.
• The Intra-diegetic gaze: in a text, a character gazes upon an object or another character in the text.
• The Extra-diegetic gaze: a textual character consciously addresses (looks at) the viewer, e.g. in dramaturgy, an aside to the audience; in cinema, acknowledgement of the fourth wall, the viewer.
• The camera's gaze: is the film director's gaze. The editorial gaze: emphasises a textual aspect, e.g. a photograph, its cropping and caption direct the reader(s) to a specific person, place, or object in the text.

Theorists Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen posit that the gaze is a relationship, between offering and demanding a gaze: the indirect gaze is the spectator's offer, wherein the spectator initiates viewing the subject, who is unaware of being viewed; the direct gaze is the subject's demand to be viewed.


The Male Gaze and feminist theory:


In the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of the "male gaze" as a feature of power asymmetry. The concept has been strongly influential on feminist film theory and media studies. In film, the male gaze occurs when the audience is put into the perspective of a heterosexual man. A scene may linger on the curves of a woman's body, for instance. Mulvey argues that in mainstream cinema, the male gaze typically takes precedence over the female gaze.

Beyonce's music video featuring lady gaga, is a good example of how the 'male gaze' is used in a music video. Both females are dressed in very revealing clothes, and use rather suggestive dance moves. At 2:54 Beyonce is crouching down stroking a very large gun (phallic object) which is sure to capture the attention of men. Also at 4:47 the camera focuses on Beyonce's body and cuts out her head which again looks at the male gaze and feminist theory "a scene may linger on the curves of a woman's body".