Introduction:

In this task I researched about who my potential target audience could be. To do this I looked into Demographics and Psychographics.

Blumler & Katz believed that in order to create a magazine for a specific audience you should understand what they like and dislike, especially what reasons they may have for investing their time and money in your magazine. Blumler & Katz, who suggested that there were four reasons known as Uses and Gratification which describes an active audience. These four reasons are Information, Personal Identity, Social Interaction and Entertainment.

Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist who tries to explain how society interacts and how individuals in society have different interpretations and responses to media texts. He argues that an audience decode a media text through the filter of several things: Demographics, Psychographics, Situation and Cultural competence. His ideas are all part of ‘Reception Theory’.

My Target Audience:

Before I start creating my own music magazine, I needed to choose a main target audience for my product. I did this because I can make sure everything I feature in my magazine attract the appropriate people to my music magazine. At the moment I have some basic knowledge and understanding of what kind of people listen and enjoy Pop music. I also know a variety of different Pop artists that these people may be interested in. However to broaden my knowledge and understanding of what kind of audience I need to use as my target audience I used a website called ‘yougov’. I used Ariana Grande who is an artist which is very popular in the world of Pop. I thought this was a good pop star to choose because of how well  known she is by many.

This told me about Ariana is most popular with the Millennials and Generation X. It also told me that her audience/fans are predominately women. Both of these facts were expected due to her style of music. Another popular artist in the Pop world is Dua Lipa. People who listen to Ariana Grande may also listen to Dua Lipa as well as they are both popular female Pop artists.

After researching and reading about Dua Lipa her most popular audience is the Millennials which was again expected. However her audience according to gender is equally popular between both male and female.  Another Pop artist which had a similar  audience as Ariana Grande is Selena Gomez.

Selena Gomez again is most popular with the Millennials and Generation X which was again expected. Selena was again the same as Ariana Grande more popular with women. This all helps me to know what target audience to choose to make my magazine the most popular and successful. Millennials are people in the age group between 24-39 and Generation X is between 23 to 38 years old in 2003. However from my own knowledge I know that people younger than this are also fans of this genre of music and artists. As both Ariana and Selena have  both women based fans and Dua Lipa had an equal amount of both my magazine will be more targeted at women but also for men as well. I will need to think about these things when designing my music magazine.

Perfect Audience Member – Dating Profile

This is what my so called ‘perfect’ audience member for my music magazine would look like. This is just a generalisation of what psychographics and demographics my audience would be as of course everyone is unique and different. This task has been very helpful as it has given me a better understanding of what kind of target audience I should be choosing and what content to use to fit this target audience.