Audience 1B

The project which I am going to be referring to my advanced portfolio where my group and I created a music video for the song 'I'm 17 - Rizzle Kicks', a digipak and a magazine advert. After researching our artist, we found that 'Rizzle Kicks' appealed to a number of teens varying from the ages between 15-19. As our artist was quite unheard of during our course, our audience consisted of fans, mainly who were in further education with an urban background. However, as the instrumental of the song 'I'm 17' was the same as Arctic Monkey's song 'Old Yellow Bricks' we had another type of audience which was fans of the indie and rock genre with a larger age range from 14-25. Due to this we were able to experiment and vary what we could feature in the video because our audience was somewhat diverse.

Our research consisted of looking into similar products to our artist. As our artist was a hybrid between pop/indie and rap it was difficult to find many artists who were similar. The closest artist we could find to ours was The Streets, Ed Sheeran and Wretch 32. All of these artists had elements of rap and singing in their songs much like Rizzle Kicks. As Ed Sheeran and Wretch 32 are also fairly new to the mainstream side of music, it was helpful to look for similar products as both of those artists had just been releasing their first studio albums. This meant that we could watch videos of their upcoming singles to gain knowledge of what their fans like. It was also convenient for us that both artists were also promoting the release of their album through newspapers.

According to Andrew Goodwin's theory, music videos should represent a connection between the lyrics and the visuals. This was evident in Wretch 32's video 'Don't Go' - a song about a girl leaving her boyfriend - as the girl is walking away from her boyfriend. We decided to think of certain scenarios which replicated our lyrics to fit in with Goodwin's theory. Also, from watching Wretch 32's 'Don't Go' we found that another feature that many artists include in their videos is themselves performing into the camera be it via rap, singing or dancing.

The Uses and Gratification approach can be applied to our media product as we feel that our audience was an active one as our audience may take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives. In reference to our music video, our audience will be able to relate to our video 'I'm 17' where our artist is taking part in activities you'd stereotypically associate with a 17 year old or anyone around that age. Our audience may watch the video and replicate some of the things that they have come across in the video rather than being passive. McQuail would see this as a 'personal identity' being created from our video as it portrays our artist and his fans in this way.

However, as our video may not necessarily portray positive scenes to our audience, we decided to add in humour and make the so called negative into a positive. Our target audience were happy with what was shown and weren't shocked by the under age drinking that was included as nearly everyone in our audience can relate to it. Older audiences may be disturbed claiming that it may encourage under age drinking isn't an issue as we believe that as we have shown things in a humoured way which emphasises how it isn't real.

Our final media product was aimed at 15-19 year olds who were in or going into further education. We feel that we have portrayed our artist in a comedic and light hearted way to boost his music career as it is our artist's breakthrough single. We also feel that we have shown stereotypes of our audience age range precisely to some extent as our general feedback was positive.