3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our audience feedback has given us a great deal of information as to how we could improve our media texts during and after constructing them. We took feedback right across the construction stages, showing audiences our footage, video sequence edits as well as website and album cover. We assured that those we took feedback from generally within our audience of 16-25s and fans of the genre (which mostly coincide).


This avatar I created using the website 'Voki' gives an example of a member of the audience we are targeting:
                                                

Having a strong idea of our target audience meant that we could shape our products accordingly; the type of music trends they like and why, the things they like to do and what they like about particular artists.



           
This video feature 3 members of our audience providing feedback at a fairly late stage in the editing process, which we took on. We discussed some of our ideas to improve what we had.

To summarise:

• More fades would be better during slower, calmer sections of the music
• Cuts would be better during more intense periods with a stronger beat (previously we had overused fades as a method of changing shot)
• The 'echo' type effect on the narrative did not really work. A sepia style grading could work better
• We over-edited the hair flick shot and it could be simplified
• Overall much of the edit was good in terms of creativity and seeming quite professional

After formally finalising our video, exporting it to YouTube, and uploading it to the respective blogs of my group members and I, we created a survey on SurveyMonkey to attain feedback on our music video. It attempts to gain an impression on people's consuming habits in terms of music and if they corresponded with their demographic i.e. age. After this is covered earlier in the survey, it seeks to hear the audience's understanding and reaction to our video, in terms of genre, what it is about, and how much they liked it and why.

Here is the survey embedded into my blog:

          Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

The results data we received could have been more valuable if we were able to attain a greater number of results from a more mixed age range, however there was some interesting findings:

• Most people taking the survey were female - female artist could appeal more to her gender if seen as aspirational. This could be different to the increasingly common convention of sexualised female artists whose appeal is strong with men 

• Most people taking the survey were young people (16-24) - this was down to most of the responses coming after the video and survey were shared on social media, where people around my age would be the main viewers of this
• The older respondents did not seem to recognise the genre whereas young people generally grasped that it was R&B or a sub-genre
   

Generally, people understood the narrative and idea of the video quite well and could clearly identify that relationships were a major theme (please excuse the expletive used by one respondent). The other responses were very similar.

Our qualitative responses were mixed but generally positive. A small number of people were not so sure about the song and some were not keen on the video in some ways. It is important to understand that almost no one will like everything, in the same way that everyone has different taste in music. The impression the survey returned was that some parts could have been clearer in terms of narrative and the way we used our shots, but overall the audience were fond of what we had made. 

As well as the survey, we also obtained video feedback, asking:

• Did you enjoy the music video and why?
• What do you think the genre is?
• What is your opinion of the artist?
• Explain your understanding of the narrative
• Does it look professional?
• What would you improve?

 

In conclusion, perhaps the most important results quite clearly identified our product as something that could potentially have success in the industry. This is demonstrated with 80% of people responding either 'yes' or 'maybe' when asked whether they would purchase the music after watching the video. Over 80% rated the video either 4 or 5 out of 5 in terms of how well it works with the song, and the most common response and also roughly the average when asked their rating out of 10, was 7. With almost 90% of respondents identifying themselves as 16-24 (our core target audience) and around a third of people saying they listen to R&B, and almost three quarters said they regularly listen to music, there is definitely a potentially strong market for our artist.