I read an article on The Balance in order to understand the importance of genre and being able to identify your target audience. Here is the article:
Why the Use of Genres Is Important
If you want to work in the music industry, understanding genres is pretty important for number of different reasons, including:
For Descriptive Purposes. The ability to be as descriptive as possible about someone's music is a great tool for a number of different music careers. Whether you're a manager trying to convince someone to listen to your artists' music, a PR person trying to sell a magazine on a review, a radio plugger trying to land some plays for an artists or a booking agent trying to get a band a show, being able to give some musical points of reference in the form of a genre description is critical.
Understanding the Audience. Understanding genre is also key to understanding audiences. Genres — or more specifically, sub-genres — tend to have a culture all their own. Fans of a particular sub-genre of music may tend to flock to the same kinds of venues and same kinds of shops, listen to the same radio stations, watch the same movies and use the same websites.
This kind of information is invaluable when it comes to promoting and marketing music and putting together live shows. If you're in or representing, say, a punk band (which is a sub-genre with a very clearly defined culture of its own), then you can increase your chances of success by understanding where punks fans go for their music in any given area. It will help you reach the right listeners every time, increasing your chances of success. In fact, understanding the identity of a sub-genre can even help direct the design of your cover art and merchandise — or dictate whether you need these things at all.
Affects Decision Making. Identifying genre will also help musicians and their representatives choose the right labels to approach with their music and can even help them decide if they need a label at all. Whereas music in the pop genre benefits from having a major label behind it, indie rock can thrive on an indie imprint — and can be self-released much easier than a record by an unknown pop artist.
Genre is the key to unlocking lost avenues for music industry success, so resist the urge to shrug it off as a meaningless label — it really is an important part of communicating your music to the masses.
In order to establish EDEN's target audience, I emailed him in hope of finding more about his audience's demographics.
Unfortunately he never replied, therefore I initiated my own research into the target audience of the indie genre. I discovered that indie is commonly listened to by ages between 16-24 by reading a variety of articles as well as finding data displaying age groups in comparison to who listens to indie music.
As the age of the target audience members fitted with students in my sixth form, I created a survey and asked people what their favorite genre was. Those who chose indie would be established as my own target audience. This will help me to ensure that my music video will be clearly in an indie style.
Initial Audience Research
Thomas is 17 years old and lives in Northamptonshire. From a young age he has always been interested in discovering new artists and really enjoyed the unique sound if indie music. The large diversity of indie songs ensures that Thomas never grows old of the genre as well as allowing him to have a varied taste of music.
Thomas has attended many music concert and festivals; he loves the atmospheric buzz created by the crowd and the distinctive sound of live music. Thomas hopes to one day be able to see EDEN perform live as this is his favorite music artist. Unable to attend EDEN's tour in 2016, Thomas is eager to go next year.
He commonly listens to music via YouTube but also has multiple songs downloaded onto his phone through iTunes. Thomas much prefers accessing music through technology compared to physical copies (CD's, vinyls) as they aren't as easy to damage.
Thomas has attended many music concert and festivals; he loves the atmospheric buzz created by the crowd and the distinctive sound of live music. Thomas hopes to one day be able to see EDEN perform live as this is his favorite music artist. Unable to attend EDEN's tour in 2016, Thomas is eager to go next year.
He commonly listens to music via YouTube but also has multiple songs downloaded onto his phone through iTunes. Thomas much prefers accessing music through technology compared to physical copies (CD's, vinyls) as they aren't as easy to damage.
