Introduction to Target Audience: Our Video

When looking into establishing our Target Audience profile, it important to remember that music videos should be entertaining and intresting as well as appealing to the people we are targeting our music video too, especially as one of the most important aspects of marketing is the target audience.

Before we can full establish who our target audience is we have to think about certain things such as 'What genre our song is in?' and 'What Channel would it appear on?' just so we fully certain on our production.


The song we are creating a music video for is called "Here Before" by Lissie which is in the Indie Folk genre. Some of the conventions of the Indie Folk genre that we are specifically conforming too are:

• Close Ups of the Artists face and there body parts (Hands, face etc.)
• Tilts used often Scenic shots of the location (Forestry)
• Positioning of camera is quite often facing the light so it creates almost a negative of the artist with the background being a positive
• Clothing is very natural and normal which stand out from other genres such as pop as they normally are all dressed up
• Setting is very picturesque and scenic
• Soft Focus is used very often mainly on the artists faces, bodies and the setting
• Fade to Black is used at the end of the music videos

The conventions in the Indie Folk genre that we are going to challenge are:

• The type of video- Most indie folk videos are only Performance but we are putting a narrative in ours too.
• Goodwin's theory in the 'Relationship between Lyrics and Visuals'

Lissie's record label is "Fat Possum records" which represents artists of many genres such as Folk, Blues, Gospel and Rap. As it is obvious this record company is not that big and well known considering there are labels such as EMI and Virgin Records. However "Fat Possum Records" are renowned for producing music of smaller artists that have an individual style of music, such as Lissie and The Black Keys for example.

As Indie Folk is a very new style of music it means that its still quite different and unique, so therefor the artists themselves are fairly unique and individual. When watching such music videos by "Birdy" and "Mumford and Sons" you can see through their videos that they are very emotive and focus more on the song than the presentation of the song. This meaning that they focus more on what there singing rather than how there going to prove there good singers to the world. For example in a pop video, like Rihannas "Who's That Chick?" her video is very focused on her and how she is presented to her audience, such as fashionable, fun, cute and a good pop singer. Whereas when watching a music video from the Indie Folk genre, like Birdy's "Shelter", you can see she is very much believing in the lyrics she is singing and her video is not focused on showing how flashy and amazing her music is, it literally just shows her emotion and connection to the song, therfor she is not shown as incredibly fashionable or fun its just showing the artist as they are, natural and purely driven by there music. As this representation is quite broad for the Indie Folk genre, we are going to try and stick to this representation as much as possible, as well as throwing in some of our own interpretation of the song.

In regards to our video type, we have decided on making it a hybrid video with both a Performance and Narrative based video. As mentioned above we will be creating this purely from our own interpretation of the song and how we have a connection to it. Our narrative will be very basic as it is not the full focus of the video, so our video will be performance weighted; this is very typical of the Indie Folk genre so we are therefor conforming to this common trend. Our narrtive is "A girl that has lost her way in life, and is searching for the person she used to be". This will be very subtle but when fully focused and drawn in by the video it will make sense perfectly. As we mentioned it will also be a performance video, this is obvious as the actor will be performing the song as if she is Lissie the artist.

When thinking ahead, if this were a real music video, our video would probably air on such channels as MTV Rocks as although this is branded as a rock channel it is very common to see Indie Folk videos on here as well as genres like Blues. This channel also produced segments such as 'Newest Noise' and 'The 10 Biggest Tracks Right Now', which ranges from all different genres and is literally just anything that is "big" or "popular" right now in the music charts. Other music channels our video could air on is 'The Vault', 'Bliss', 'Kiss' and '4Music' as all of these channels are very general and play most genres of music that appeal to people so that way there is something for everyone.