R+P Post 4: Audience groups of interest

Though I am not an obsessive consumer of music, there are two audience groups that I take an interest in. Furthermore, I feel as though I would be reasonably confident in targeting these audience groups if we were to choose them as targets for our own music video.

Fans of Rock Music

What makes Rock music so interesting is that it is able to transcend the typical boundaries of age and gender more than any other genre. Rock music is one of the most universal genres of music, which means that targeting fans of Rock music would attract a large audience.

Therefore I decided to do some more research into the audience with a specific focus on their listening and purchasing habits. I discovered that Rock music has the largest fanbase; controlling about 33.8% of the market in 2013 over the 31% of Pop music. Rock music was also more popularly consumed than Pop music via streaming services, with Rock representing 34.6% of streamed songs to the 27.7% of Pop. Remarkably enough, the only instance in which Rock was not the dominant genre was in sales of singles, in which Pop music was top. This means that targeting fans of Rock music would be useful for our campaign, as we are making an album alongside our video, not a single.

Music consumers in the UK

The UK audience is particularly fascinating when it comes to music: though we only have the world's third largest music industry, we are the world's largest consumer of music, with an average sale of albums at 1.6 per head. This would not only suggest that the UK market would be quite lucrative, but that there is a lot of room for the UK's music industry to develop and grow.

I then decided to research the correlation between these two audience groups. 

Sure enough, Rock music and it's sub-genres are some of the most listened to songs on Spotify in the UK. Therefore these audience groups would be suitable as target audiences for our own product, especially so if we market our band with as an alt. rock band with a British identity.

In addition, I also did some research into the audience listening and purchasing habits. Firstly, in terms of album sales by genre, rock took up 33.8% of the market in 2013, beating pop music to the top spot by 2.8%. Secondly, in reference to streams by genre, rock beat pop once again (34.6% to 27.7%). In fact, the only time pop beat rock was in singles sales. From this I have learnt a lot about the audience for Rock music; specifically that they tend to consume their music through albums and use streaming as an alternative method of consumption. This information will be crucial to my project when deciding on the marketing strategies.