Under the JICTAR model (Joint industry committee for television advertising research) my target audience could be primarily seen as broad spectrum but mainly the A, B and C categories due to musical preferences. The genre of rock/ folk tends towards the upper income spectrum as opposed to hip hop and rap generally stigmatised as low income taste.
There are numerous markets that this song appeals to as it contains aspects of indie and folk music alongside the main Christian orientation. This means that the music tends to have a typical following in the age ranges of 25 and 55. This is evidence supported by Radio listening figures from America where there is a larger market. According to http://blog.beliefnet.com/gospelsoundcheck/2008/07/are-you-an-average-christian-r.html the radio stations playing Christian music base their music programming on a fictitious listener they call “Becky,” a woman in her 30s or 40s, married, with kids, typical soccer mom. To try and prove this surveys have been conducted whereby the results were as follows:
- A women 45-54 years of age
- Pentecostal/Charismatic (with non-denominational and Baptists also highly represented)
- Living in the South (inclusive of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida)
- Politically conservative
- An activist
- Attends church regularly (71% of listeners say they attend church frequently while 1 in 10 say they never attend church)
56% are women 18-44 who attend church less frequently and listen to Christian radio less frequently
This data is furthered by looking at the statistics Youtube provides for artists such as Chris Tomlin and Matt Redman. Below are the statisitics for Chris Tomlin's video 'I Lift My Hands' This shows us that the main audience are based in and around America and are older females
There are some conclusions on age groups I can draw from this data. However, what I have to remember is that this data is drawn from the American gospel market whereby religion is more widely followed and consequently the same may not be true in the British market. Therefore I conducted a survey using survey monkey in order to gauge peoples impressions of the market and personal tastes when it came to music. The survey can be found here The questions I asked ranged from simple questions such as identifying which faith or age group the audience belonged to, to more complicated questions such as the reasons for particular habits. A breakdown of the results from my 40 correspondents can be seen below alongside the seven questions asked.
This showed that the majority of the audience did not follow any particular religion or did not wish to be affiliated. This means that my audience is small, as expected but it lead to me try and find out whether the audience for my chosen song would be solely Christian or not.
Therefore I asked a question about whether people had listened to religious music before. To which the response was largely no but the proportion who said that they had , was larger then the proportion who identified themselves as Christian showing that the audience may be larger than expected.
Finding out that the audience had indeed listened to religious music led me to see which artists they may have listened to. Therefore I asked them whether they had heard of any of these artists before, artists that had come up during my research. There were a few religious artists with more yes than no in the form of Matisyahu, Red and Matt Redman which led me to question what put them there in the mainstream. Upon research I discovered the Matisyahu is featured on the FIFA 13 soundtrack so many of those questioned will have heard of him. Red have been featured on Magic Radio several times whereas Matt Redman is famous for Grammy wins and for the numerous covers other artists have done of his songs. However as a whole this data showed that there was little awareness of religious music across the population.
This question was about preferences and shocked me in the fact that the yes answer was so popular. To me this indicated that there was perhaps a growing awareness of the category as having some standout music.
Penultimately I asked about the tendency to listen to religious music in comparison to normal music. This showed up that even the most diligent Religious music listeners were influenced by the popular music of the time and that a lot of the time it took precedence as indicated by the low everyday figures for religious music and the high about 3 times a week. This lead me to question how I could utilise some of the generic conventions of popular music within my piece
Lastly, I asked about the ages of those I questioned in order to gauge whether the results I was getting were from the younger spectrum of the audience or the older. I suspected it would be the younger aspect having shared the survey on personal social media and I was correct. This gave me a new take on the genre as it meant that there were listeners out there as evidenced by the above 30% listening rate but that they would only listen if they felt that the genre was changing away form the traditional overt look on it.
The survey helped set in stone my views on the genre and consequently directed my production as it steered me away from the potential pitfalls of overt imagery.
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