Music videos are really important for both audiences and institutions. The audience seek enjoyment from them; it is a chance to see as well as hear their favourite artists, putting a face to the name which markets the artist. Music videos can also provide an extra meaning to the song, making any underlying points or issues clear to the audience. They can also provide motivation: the audience could want to emulate the artist who forges an identity through their music videos. They also offer a form of escapism and often focus on enhancing different emotions.

Music videos often improve the popularity of an artist as well as increasing the sales, making the institution a lot of money. In certain videos, often those of a hugely popular artist, product placement is used, promoting both the product and the artist. It is important to know who my target audience is as I will need to follow certain guidelines if my music video is going to appeal to them, genre is a deciding factor so once I have chosen a song I will need to research similar products so I can conform to the conventions used.

Target Audience Research:
To help me discover more about my target audience I decided to conduct a small questionnaire asking 20 people a series of questions.

 Are you male or female?



How old are you?

What type of music out of the following genres do you like best?

From this brief questionnaire I can see that every person I asked was relatively young and a huge majority of them liked Pop and Rock style music the best. This has made me think that this would be a good route to go down and I will try and base my ideas around this new information so as to appeal to my target audience 17-25 yr olds.

Distribution:

My music video would be available for people to watch on certain television channels, mainly music based channels such as VIVA and MTV. These channels play a vairety of different types of music and I have watched them to help me when identifying common conventions of music videos. My music video could also be accessed online on websites such as youtube. I should also consider this when making my video as if it was to be passed and viewed on T.V certain guidelines would need to be adhered to, for instance it should not contain any explicit material which could be harmful or offensive to viewers. This also applies to online media, although it is not as strict as online media is a lot harder to regulate and. I have also realised that most artists have their own website, where their videos are shown.

For example Professor Greens website:

This promotes his new video 'Jungle' which due to its content, may not be shown on television. I have decided that I want my music video to be non-offensive so that it would be suitable for viewing by anyone and could be shown in all of the mentioned areas.