Audience

Artists have always got to have their audience as the main focus point in whatever they're producing or performing. Even if they wish to be individual and stand out from the norm, if the audience don't like that, then their career is cut short, artists are reliant on their audience. The music video is an effective tool for connecting with the audience in ways you can't through a track being heard on the radio. It allows the singers to show their personality and style through the video, as well as the importance of the track itself. The content you include in the video can have a direct effect on the type of audience who will watch it. For example, if you choose to do an animated and brightly coloured pop video, your audience will often be children and young teens.

Over the past century or so, media analysts have developed several effects models providing theoretical explanations of how humans ingest the information transmitted by media texts and how this may or may not influence their behaviour. Four noticable theories are,

1) The Hypodermic Needle Model
2) Two-Step Flow
3) Uses & Gratifications
4) Reception Theory

I will explain a couple of these theories to provide a general idea of where some media analysts thoughts laid at that time.

The Hypodermic Needle Model

Dating back to the 1920s, this theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media. This theory was developed in an age where media was still fairly new, radio and cinema were less than two decades old. This model suggests that the information from a text passes into the mass consciousness of the audience unmediated; the experience, intelligence and opinion of an individual are not relevant to the reception of the text. This theory suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by media-makers. It assumes that the audience are passive and heterogenous. This theory is still used to explain why certain groups in society should not be exposed to certain media texts, for fear that they will watch or read sexual or violent behaviour and will then act them out themselves.

Reception Theory

In the 1980s and 1990s a lot of work was done on the way individuals received and interpreted a text, and how their individual circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity) affected their reading. This work was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience - the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code. However, by using recognised codes and conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to aspects such as genre, the producers can position the audience and thus create a certain amount of agreement on what the code means. This is known as a preferred reading.