Target Audience of Artist

Ellie Goulding’s style of music is Pop, Indie Pop, Electro Pop and Folktronica. The genre of music suggests that countless fans will be into Pop and Indie music which helps me narrow down my research to these types of music magazines. This means I will be looking current magazine such as “NME”, “Q” and “Top of the Pops”. Not only is she shown in music magazines but has been on the cover of “Company” a woman’s fashion magazine, this also means that the woman that read this will most likely know who she is and a majority, at least, will certainly like her music. Researching into 'NME' I found an article inside about Ellie Goulding. Knowing that this magazine is interested in her I looked on the NRS website (National Readership Survey) to see what the target audience was for this magazine.

As this is quite hard to see I will explain that the age range 15-44 there are 294,000 people in this age range out of 325,000 people surveyed. 241,000 of the 325,000 people surveyed are also male. This means that this magazine is aimed at 15-44 males. I then went onto finding the ‘NME’ reader profile. This states the following – MALE 69% FEMALE 31% AVERAGE AGE 24 WORKING FULL TIME 52% WORKING PART TIME 7% STILL STUDYING 29% ABC1 65% CIRCULATION: 40,948 READERSHIP: 369,000 ABCe UNIQUE USERS: 4,454,983 http://www.ipcadvertising.com/resource/fd4e20nlh1xefkowjxdha4xu.pdf

To make this easier to understand here are a few charts to consider -

I feel putting these in a graph like this give an easier reading of what I have written above, these show a clearer picture of who is the ones buying this magazine and this can give a better understanding of the target audience. The class status of this magazine is read the socio-economic classification ABC1 so is not read by the working class/unemployed. This may not due to the fact that they do not like the type of music in this magazine but more likely due to them not being able to afford commodities such as these.

I then look into “Q” magazine and find a link to an article online Ellie Goulding: Starry Eyes, Itchy Feet: http://news.qthemusic.com/2010/06/interview_ellie_goulding_-_sta.html Again looking on the NRS website I look at the audience for this magazine. I can see that again it is most popular with the socio-economic classification ABC1 with 416 out of 582,000 surveyed. Also the similarities with the age group 15-44 with 505,000 and 406,000 of the 582,000 being male. This is very similar to “NME” magazine.

There is also an article on the Clash Music website which just adds to the popularity of this talented star - http://www.clashmusic.com/news/ellie-goulding-album-details

From all this information I can conclude that her fans are upper class, young adults. A lot of this suggests that most her fan base is male, however, with her being on the front cover of “Company” Magazine and with my personal knowledge of knowing that many girls my age like her I can conclude that it is both male and female audiences. When looking into this video on YouTube at the one with the most views, 125,396 to be exact, I found this -

This proves my point that females are fans of Ellie Goulding too. We can also see from the chart that she is most popular in England, Europe, Australia and the USA. This doesn't surprise me as these are all places that have a lot of access in the media business as they are the countries with the most money that have access to multimedia companies and where they attempt to dig out artists through talent shows.

Within the media we can also see that the popularity of this singer is gigantic, a worldwide star who appeals to many people. She has increased her popularity by interacting with her fans through networking sites so fans feel as though Ellie Goulding is one of their actual friends by knowing these things about her. Sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have allowed her to do this.

Permission

Dear Ploydor Records,

I am a student from Sussex Downs College and as part of my media A level I have to create a music video for an existing artist in the industry, who doesn’t have a music video already. I am writing to ask you for copyright permission over one of your artist’s songs.

Ellie Goulding is someone that has created brilliant music over the past year and I would really like to be able to produce a music video to her song “I’ll Hold My Breath”, this will be capturing her behaviorism's and the style that runs through her music videos that have been released. Along with this I have to develop an advert and digipack for this video which will also consist of the lyrics and her name. I hope that this is probable and I would be happy to send you the finished product of my work to show you.

Please let me know as soon as possible as to whether I can go ahead with this. Thank you for taking your time to read this email, it is greatly appreciated.


Yours Sincerely,

Jessica Blackman



Copyright is obviously illegal and is concerned with the protection over the artist's work and has always and will always be a significant issue for the music industry. However, it has become a major problem in the past few years with access to technology that means these tracks can be distributed easily and quickly over the internet. This causes the record labels sales to reduce for artists and this could create a huge impact to how well the artist succeeds. I am aware that this could be a problem for me being able to use Ellie Goulding's song for this project and this is why it is important to send a letter to the company for permission.

Song Choice

For my song choice I have researched into a few songs that I would like to use:

• The Days - 'Evil Girls'
,
• Good Luck Jane - 'Here Again'
,
• Ellie Goulding - "I'll Hold My Breath'
,
• Airborne Toxic Event - 'The Girls In Their Summer Dresses'
  
.

I have decided to chose Ellie Goulding with her song 'I'll Hold My Breath', I decided to chose this song as I really like her music, I feel the lyrics are something that can be interpreted in a few ways which leaves it open to interpretation for someone like me creating a music video. However, when I read these lyrics I imagined how I could create it and this triggered my enthusiasm. The reason I rejected the others is because The Days song isn't actually that long and I felt that this wouldn't show my full capability. When looking at the song by Good Luck Jane I discovered that the quality of sound for these songs is quite poor which will affect the quality of the overall finished product. Between my group we decided to go for Ellie Goulding as we have all heard the song whereas not all of us had heard Airborne Toxic Event so felt it more logical to go with this.

These are the lyrics to the final song chosen, Ellie Goulding 'I'll Hold My Breath' -

Breathe air you're not used to
Tread floors you don't fall through
make waves...
you crash a symbol hard
follow noone, always play the wrong card
waste days, in foreign places
shed light, on your better side
reassure me that you'll wait for me, wait for me as long as it takes now

hold my breath
i'll hold my breath

until you see me in your dreams
we'll stay awake beneath the trees
we'll watch the buildings turn to dust
a sky of diamonds just for us
you are the risk i'll always take
the only branch i'll never break
those fears we'll blow them all away (we'll blow them all away)

fight fires in your best clothes
touch skin with your eyes closed
chase thunder..
with the volume down
pack a suitcase, wander to the next town
force quit, on your losing streak
solve a riddle in a magazine, be tongue in cheek


tell me that we're still too young
that we're still too young and i'll hold my tongue

until you see me in your dreams
we'll stay awake beneath the trees
we'll watch the buildings turn to dust
a sky of diamonds just for us
you are the risk i'll always take
the only branch i'll never break
those fears we'll blow them all away (we'll blow them all away)

i'm here, i'm here to take you
i'll swim, i'll swim to save you
no fall, i'm here to catch you
i'll swim, i'll swim to save...

until you see me in your dreams
we'll stay awake beneath the trees
we'll watch the buildings turn to dust
a sky of diamonds just for us
you are the risk i'll always take
the only branch i'll never break
those fears we'll blow them all away (we'll blow them all away)

(3.45 minutes)