Target Audience
55% of Americans listen to rock, which is estimated to be about 170,000,000. That is a huge amount of fans in just one country, which is why it is such a popular genre worldwide. Rock appeals to both males and females, and there are a number of magazines that are primarily based on rock.
Kerrang! is the main rock magazine that comes to mind when researching this topic. It is an extremely popular magazine, with it's circulation (the number of copies released per issue) being 42,077. From this magazine cover, it shows that the target audience for Kerrang! is 18-30 year old. It seems that this is the target audience because of the sell lines on the cover. For example, the tagline reads 'Massive Download Ticket Give Away'. Download is a popular rock festival, and the primary audience for festivals are 18-30 year olds. Also, there is a lot of black and red on the cover, with many males featuring on the cover - this suggests that it is mainly targeted towards males. However, from research we can see that this is not the case.
This link shows the forum on the Kerrang! website, and there are many young females leaving comments of appreciation about the magazine. In addition, I also have a few friends that are girls that read the magazine, and I also occasionally read it. If I read magazines a lot more than I do, I would most likely have a subscription to Kerrang!, however I do not read them that often. The magazine is priced at £2.10, however this was in 2007, so the price would have most likely increased in the past 5 years. This suggests that the target audience is those who live in households of medium incomes, such as £19000 - £34000.
The Demographic Audience for Kerrang!
Male: 60% Female:40%
Age: 16-24 year olds
Ethnicity: White British
Social Class: Categories C-D (Supervisory, skilled manual, semi-skilled and unskilled manual)
Psychographics
The psychographics have been described as 'people who aspire to be respected among other people and people who wish to have a high paid job.'
I was immediately quite shocked at this statement, but after thinking about it some more, I realised why this claim was made. As the majority of the target audience are 16-24 year old males, they tend to have high aspirations and 'dreams' at that age - so to say that they want the audience psychographics to be that, it does make a lot of sense.
http://journalism.winchester.ac.uk/?page=257
Demographics for my audience:
Male: 50% Female: 50%
Age: 15-30
Ethnicity: White British
Social Class: C2 - D
Psychographics
- Good work ethic
- Play an instrument or aspire to
- Admire rock idols
- Listen to rock regularly
- Music is an important part of their life
- Extremely interested in rock music
- Rock being their favourite genre
Demographics for my audience:
Male: 50% Female: 50%
Age: 15-30
Ethnicity: White British
Social Class: C2 - D
Psychographics
- Good work ethic
- Play an instrument or aspire to
- Admire rock idols
- Listen to rock regularly
- Music is an important part of their life
- Extremely interested in rock music
- Rock being their favourite genre
There are many more rock magazines, hinting that the genre is extremely popular as it has quite a few magazines centred around it. One of them is Total Guitar, which is shown on the right. It is a magazine primarily for guitar players, however it does have a lot more than that in the issues. For example, there are interviews and information on rock bands, it isn't just full of guitar terminology and jargon. However, it does help if you play guitar, as you will be able to enjoy more of the magazine. Although, whilst there are people that listen to rock but do not play guitar, there are also a lot who do. This could be for the same reason as mine - that rock music inspired them to learn the instrument. Quite a few of my friends play guitar, and they're favourite genre is also rock. This could be evident through the circulation of Total Guitar - 42,171. That is more than Kerrang!, showing that TG is more in demand. I believe it is mainly read by males aged 18-40. This is because of the colour scheme on this cover; black and silver are generally colours associated with men, and the main image is of two middle aged men which would generally attract males rather than females. This contrasts with Kerrang!, suggesting that each magazine can alter the target audience, and that the actual genre of rock does not have one singular target audience. The target audience for my magazine will be both males and females in the age range of 17-28.
The 'Rock Music' Facebook page has an incredible 16,812,416 likes - showing that a huge portion of the audience is relatively young (the majority of Facebook users are aged 15-30). However, the only problem with getting statistics from Facebook is that not all of the listeners of rock are active on Facebook, so it is hard to produce a real number of how many people like and listen to rock.
How the audience listens to rock
Music has many variations and portals through which it can be transferred and listened to. A main one in our lives is MP3 players, and to whittle that down even more, Apple iPods. iPods are extremely popular, and I cannot think of one friend or relative that doesn't own one.
This link tells us that even in 2005, 22 million people already owned iPods. In 7 years, that number could have only increased - most likely exponentially. To transfer music to our iPods, there exists a program called 'iTunes'. iTunes is also owned by Apple, and is a very popular format for listening to and sharing music. However, more recently a new program has been introduced to a wide audience - Spotify. Spotify is a place where you can listen to and share music - and as it links with Facebook you can see which friends are listening to what music - so it enhances our social interaction through technology; this suggests that it encourages the two-step flow theory. I myself use both iTunes and Spotify; I mainly use iTunes to transfer music to my iPod and I use Spotify to just listen to the music straight from my laptop.
The amazing thing about Spotify is that when you create a playlist, it can link you to something called the 'Playlist Radio' for that named playlist. For example, I have a playlist named 'Rock', and when I listen to it, I have the option of listening to the Playlist Radio for Rock. This is a brilliant feature, as it opens the audience to a much wider range of that genre, and introduces us to music that we may have never heard before.
In addition to these programmes, there are many websites that promote music genres without even intending to. A main example that comes to mind is Tumblr. Tumblr is a blogging site, but the type of blogs that are on there are very different to a run-of-the-mill blog you may find on a search engine. People mainly 'reblog' images from each other, rather than text posts. Through these images being reblogged, music can be strongly advertised to the Tumblr audience. To the right is a picture of You Me At Six's Josh Franceshi with Bring Me The Horizon's lead singer Oli Sykes. With pictures like these, there are usually 'tags' at the bottom, which tell you a little bit more about the image. Through these tags people find out more and more about artists and bands, as they discover them through clicking on the tag. Not only do they discover artists through Tumblr, but I believe that the site can have an extraordinary effect on a persons identity. For example, pictures which show clothing and tattoos such as these...
...can lead to an identity change. By constantly seeing these on the news feed - or 'dashboard' as it's called - it can create an idea of what we think we should look like, as it is always being drip-fed to us through the media. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the audience of rock have tattoos and piercings, as they believe they should look like that if they enjoy that genre of music, and they begin to follow the stereotype. I believe that this sort of action or change happens subconsciously, and therefore follows the hypodermic needle theory.
Because of features and programs like this, the audience can find and discover new bands and subgenres of rock that they haven't heard before, which can ultimately make a band more successful than they would have been 30 years ago. If the only portal for music was radio, it would have been incredibly difficult to get noticed and become successful. However, now that this type of technology does exist, it makes it much more easier for the audience to experience new music, therefore making bands and artists more easily noticed and recognised.
Who likes rock?
For more current rock – which is what I will be focusing my
magazine on – the primary audience are both males and females aged 15-30.
However, for older rock such as Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix, the audience
are mainly males aged 45 and above - this is the secondary audience. I would believe
that this is because as the genre of rock changes with the years and develops,
the audience does not move with it. People are usually very reluctant to change
something they are comfortable with, so they do not tend to like it when a
genre moves on. This is the main reason that the primary audience is the
younger generation, as they have only recently been introduced to rock, and it
will not have changed much since they first heard it. Furthermore, it is
evident that a lot more women are involved in the audience of rock now than
ever. Perhaps this is because women are now idols in rock and not just seen as
objects, as previously mentioned. This could encourage women to find out more
about the genre, or perhaps they feel it is more acceptable to enjoy it on the
same level men have been able to for 50+ years.
There are many niche groups in the audience of rock; such as
the people who listen to subgenres. These subgenres include death metal,
post-hardcore, black metal, glam rock, grunge, skate rock and many more. These
subgenres tend to be very niche and specific, however there are larger
subgenres of rock that have a wider audience. These are called broad audiences,
and exist for subgenres such as alt/rock, pop/rock and indie/rock. I believe
these are more popular and have a larger audience because they are more widely played
around the world, on platforms such as radio stations and television music
channels.
Poll
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As you can see from the picture below, I asked 12 people in sixth form what their favourite genre was out of these 6 main genres, and displayed the results on a graph. As you can see, Pop was the most popular genre – which was to be expected as ‘Pop’ has derived from the word ‘popular’ music. Next was Rock, which was not surprising as a lot of people that I know do enjoy listening to that genre. Although what did shock me was the result of R&B and Rap – I did think they would be more popular than they are. However, I must stress that this survey was only carried out on 12 people in one sixth form, so it does not give a wide or reliable representation of favourite genres amongst all 16-18 year olds.
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