Q3. What Have You Learned From Your Audience Feedback?

Throughout the construction of our advanced portfolio we collected and collated audience feedback and then applied it by modifying our main product and ancillary texts. We researched and concluded our primary, secondary and tertiary audiences early on in the process, to ensure that we were creating authentic and focused work which would appeal to appropriate market. We actually formed the primary and secondary audience groups using our first audience feedback questionnaire by asking a group a range of ages:

Primary Audience: 18-24 year old Alternative rock fans

Why we chose this as our primary audience?

Using a combination of our own knowledge and research with early audience feedback on the song Call and Gone, we generated the audience group - alternative rock fans between the ages of 18 -24. This is due to the original band and song belonging to the gothic/ alternative rock genre, and also due to their stylistic similarity to recent revival wave of newer gothic/ alternative bands such as The Horrors, Toy and Drenge. Although, these bands are not known for having age specific music, it is clear from the types of festivals they play (E.g. Reading/ Leeds) and the turnout at their live performances - that their primary audience are older teenagers to young adults. Furthermore, since the band members are all between the ages of 18-19, it is more likely that they would attract a younger audience as Dyers star theory suggests; that an audience relates with (pop) stars, as they believe that they share certain traits with them.

Music consumption

As they are a younger audience it is most likely that they would listen to The Great Northern in more contemporary ways such as digital downloads or streaming to mobile devices via apps such as Spotify or iTunes. As this audience is part of the web 2.0 generation and constantly uses devices such as smartphones or laptops which support technologic convergence. Also, streaming and illegal downloading is very common amongst this age group with sites such as Pirate Bay or LimeWire, however, it is unlikely that this fan base would want to undercut such a small-scale band.

However, this genre is known for its popularity in vinyl sales, a recent and growing trend amongst the XY generation who did not even grow up listening to vinyls. This is demonstrated with the emergence of a vinyl chart, and in 2014, record sales grew by more than 50% to hit more than a million, the highest since 1996, and the upward curve has continued in 2015.

Engagement with artists

Most 16-24 year olds are very active on social media sites and use them regularly to socialize and follow their favorite artists on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram - all of which we have created for the band. Also, since the band members are also young are more likely to use and update their platforms it would cause additional engagement - bands such as Drenge sometimes use Reddit and do AMAs.

Reddit is a website where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links which hold AMAs (Ask Me Anything) giving popular figures a platform to answer any user submitted questions. Richard Dyer's star theory says that fans buy into the image of the artist or band and that interaction via social media is an important part of being a fan. David Gauntlett also talks about artist identity in the modern world and how constructing an identity is a required for success. Artists construct this image through social media sites and fans engage with them.

A long running trend with fans of this age is fan girl/ fan boy culture prevalent mostly amongst females due to a physical attraction to band members (who are almost all male in this genre). Fans would also see and possibly meet the band at live shows due to the small capacity of the venues such as Dingwalls in Camden (500 people).

Secondary Audience: Fans of the genre rock

Why we chose this as our secondary audience?

Using a combination of our own knowledge and research with early audience feedback on the song Call and Gone, we generated the audience group - rock fans with an unspecified age. This is due to the original band and song belonging to the gothic/ alternative rock genre, and due to their stylistic similarity to older rock bands such as Nick Cave and TBS, Jeff Buckley and Radiohead, as mentioned by questionnaire responses. Since the fans of this genre vary in age we decided not to be specific and limit our possible audience. After choosing this audience based off of audience feedback questionnaires we chose to incorporate artistic influences from these bands websites, digipacks and music videos to extend our reach to this audience.

Music consumption

Again, since we decided that the secondary audience did not sit within a specific age range, it is possible that The Great Northerns work would be consumed in both non- traditional (as aforementioned with the primary audience) and traditional ways. Traditional implying consuming or purchasing the music at a small-scale record store in either a CD or vinyl format, as the older audience (45 60) may prefer to handle the physical copy of the CD and be able to play and listen to it in a car for example.

Engagement with artists

Once more, the younger fans of rock would likely engage with the audience in the same way, as would the primary audience as it conventional of our generation. Also, some active members of the secondary audience might go to see the band live, however, aggressive crowds and sub-par venues might discourage older people. Moreover, it is less likely that the older members of the secondary audience would follow them across social media sites as some are only truly prevalent amongst young audiences E.g. Instagram (14 35). Therefore, it is most likely that they would engage with the band via their website or newsletter function which we have made available to sign up for on our website for those who are not keen followers of social media platform

Feedback throughout the project Throughout the project, we collected feedback from our friends, classmates, teachers and parents, in order to record data from our two main audience groups - many of whom were (alternative) rock fans or who knew about the genre. We collected data using two official audience feedback questions then narrowed our focus on private interviews and then finally extensive reviews of our final products. In the pre-written audience feedback questionnaires

we started by asked a range of people with a range of music taste general questions about how where they would place the music video. Then, after securing our target age groups we were able to collect feedback on aspects of our music video, digipack and website such as their opinions on various shots or on the video as a whole, as well as getting opinions on specific elements of the digipack panels and the sections and fonts of the website.

Getting outside opinions on the project was extremely useful as it allowed us to see the products differently from how our audience saw them, as we often lost perspective on them after spending too much time on them. Sometimes, we found that other people often had very different opinions to us on certain aspects and that we often found flaws that our target audience didn't even notice. For example, I thought that we didnt incorporate enough clips of Spencer actually lip-syncing the song. However, when we asked other people what they thought of it, they thought it worked well with the sequence and suited the visual flow of the song. Furthermore, throughout the process our audience agreed that our products very much looked as if they belonged to the alternative rock genre and some were even able to pin point aspect in which resembled other artists (however not as direct copy) such as our websites splash page or the black and white filter on our music video.

Feedback on the final products

We collected the final feedback on our music video in person through an interview style format as we felt that we would be able to get the most detailed and specific feedback if it was an intimate conversation.

Overall, the general census was that

For the Music video (digipak and website):

1. People enjoyed viewing the projects and thought that they went well with the song and the lyrics (Goodwin)

2. The viewers generally understood that the products belonged to the (alternative) rock genre, but did also not feel like we were ripping off the image of another particular artist.

3. We had successfully conveyed the themes that we had intended it to e.g. loss, death, life, dark/ light and religion.

4. People responded positively to the band's branding and said they would buy into them (even when they werent huge fans of the genre).