Audience Research

I created a survey with questions in that I decided would be helpful in designing a successful music magazine for my target audience. I used the website www.surveymonkey.co.uk to create the survey and used the link https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/CX28MLJ to send to contacts who I knew were reliable sources. I received 15 responses to the survey which I feel is enough people to get a small but fair sample. The results of my survey are below. I did this in order to find out the most likely age range of my magazine and what genre to focus on for that audience. I also used my survey to collect the topics that people are most interested in so i can make sure to include these in my own media product.

Q1

I chose to ask my sample audience this question in order to compare my survey results to conventional/stereotypical gender preferences when considering the target audience. Knowing that a large proportion of my sample were female will help me when analysing the other questions.

Q2

I created my survey and decided to email the link to family and friends. I mostly chose people in this age range as by having done research, I know that the most likely people to buy a music magazine are usually in this age category. I will go on to analyse the survey results with it in mind that my target audience will be between 16-25 years old. When analysing the most popular genre of my results, this will only account for this particular age range, not most popular genre of music magazine in general.

Q3

This is a relevant question to have included as this gives me an idea of whether people answering the survey have an idea of the topic and whether or not have an interest into the subject. This also reinforces my research into 16-25 year olds (roughly) being interested in music magazines. Only one out of 15 people who answered this question were not interested and did not buy music magazines, therefore making my audience sample very reliable for me.

Q4

Knowing how regularly this particular sample reads music magazines gives me an idea of how up to date the sample is on modern magazines' layouts and content. As the most popular answer here was reading music magazines 'often' it tells me that the sample will be a reliable source when finding out what modern conventions are and what audiences prefer.

Q5

Asking this question to my sample allows me to find out the topic in the magazine that people most care about reading and will be attracted to when buying magazines. The most popular answer here was to read music magazines in order to discover information about music artists that people are interested in. In my own media product I will aim to include some of the most popular music artists in my specified genre in the hopes that my audience will see artists that they are interested in and will be attracted into buying the magazine. I will include these artists names on the front cover of my own magazine so people will see this easily.

Q6

I used a rating system in order for me to see how my sample preferred each topic that may appear in a music magazine. This way, I have an idea of what my most likely audience will prefer to see. I intend to use the topics that my sample most prefer in my own media product. In the table above you can see that the topic the sample were most interested in was up to date information about their favourite artists, which correlated with Q5. The least favourite topic here was posters. I will prioritise other topics over posters when deciding what to include on my front cover and contents page.

Q7

My final question was to get a better idea of what genre my audience would most like to be featured, this way if I target my audience for 16-25 year olds, I can specifically include artists from their most commonly liked genre. There was a clear difference here between answers, with pop music being the most popular. I will aim to focus my media product around pop culture.

The data I have gathered from creating a survey researching my target audience suggests that the age most interested in music magazines are young people between the ages of 16-25. From this, I can also come to the conclusion that the most popular genre of music in this age category was pop music. This may be because there are so many magazines that are available today that feature pop artists, such as Q and Top of the Pops - which are also mostly aimed at youth.

The most popular topic featured in music magazines turned out to be 'information about favourite artists' among this sample. I can apply this to a wider audience and draw the conclusion that within this age group, young adults are less concerned about things like posters or reviews and are most interested in up to date information on their favourite artists. This is therefore something I will be focusing on featuring in my own media product.