Audience Theory: Life Matrix Theory

I have created a Pixton with captions and images to easily explain the Life Matrix. I have applied the Life Matrix theory to my groups potential song choice - Desire by Years and Years. Due to the genre, being a dance/ pop song, I believe that our audience for this song will be people who fit into the tribe wired or fun/atics categories. I think this because the song is connected to the young as the style of music is synth based and young people like mainstream chart music. Years and Years' previous song 'King' reached number one in the chart. The kind of music they make is typical of the club song.

 

Audience Theory: Uses and Gratifications Theory

Here I made a spider diagram of Bulmer and Katz uses and gratifications theory which will be useful when thinking about the audience of our Music Video.

Audience Theory: Two Step Flow Theory

The two-step flow model was first presented by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet in the 1944 study, The People’s Choice. It focused on how people made decisions during the campaign for Presidents. It was surprising to them that they found out informal and personal associates were mentioned much more than being exposed to newspaper or radio sources as influences on voting behaviour. By gaining this data, theorists Katz and Lazarsfeld created the two-step flow theory of mass communication.

This theory focuses on the belief that the media influences people in two different stages. The first one involves people known as opinion leaders. They are attentive to the mass media and receive messages from it. Then, they pass on their own beliefs on this content to associates who are less effective and they have influence over. Therefore, members of the audience receive information from the media with the thoughts and ideas expressed by the opinion leaders, which means they aren’t directly influenced, it happens in a two-step flow. The researchers believed this diminished the media’s power and resulted in them concluding that social factions were importantly related to how audiences interpreted texts too. This is often known as the limited effects paradigm.

“Personal influence” is a term which was created in reference to this process which exists between the media’s messages and the audience’s reaction to it. The researchers learnt that the opinion leaders can be influential in getting people to change their thoughts and behaviours and are similar to those who become influenced. This theory has helped to improve our knowledge on how the mass media influence how we make decisions. It helped us to understand why particular media campaigns may fail to change the audiences’ behaviour and helps us to predict the influence of media messages on people’s behaviour.

It is therefore beneficial to helping my group and I create our music video as it implies we should think about how different opinion leaders may interpret the messages and themes within our video and how they could inform less active audience members about it. To avoid any negativity it emphasises that we should avoid including controversial scenes like alcohol or drug references as the belief that we endorse anything illegal could be incorrectly believed and spread to other people. However, it also shows that if we produce a video with positive themes in a professional way it could result in optimistic views on it being spread to lots of people and they may be influenced to believe in them too. 

Audience Theory: Halls Reception Theory

Audience Theory: Hebdiges Subculture Theory

Hebdige's Theory about cultures was written in 1979 and looked into how cultures, subcultures and counter cultures have evolved over time.

He mainly looked at the sub and counter cultures such as Punks and Rockers, and the elements behind it.

These include their background, ethnicity, regional identity and class. He said that these counter cultures can be seen as a symbolic form of resistance against the mainstream culture and are looked down upon.

One example that was seen was the 1990's rave, where many young people or students would gather in a field to play loud music and take drugs. It was frowned upon by mainstream media, and laws were implemented to clamp down on the problem.

This can be related to our audience as our song is likely to appeal to a subculture of fans of Dance Pop genre, rather than fans of rock and R&B.

 

 

 

 

Audience Mindmap

Here is a mind map of how I will target my video towards a specific audience. I have included many different aspects of an audience within this.