We conducted this questionnaire in order to get a better understanding of what audience we were selling our artist to and what they wanted to see in our music video. The questionnaire also helped us to establish what kind of age range we were looking at, this then contributed to us conducting our focus group interviews accordingly. We managed to get 19 respondents all together which gave us quite a range of opinions. This helped us in steering us in the right direction, thinking about the representations that we would portray in our music video.
These are the results:
Question 1: Do you like R&B/hip hop music?
We chose to start with this question because we wanted to establish if it was worth doing a music video centred around the R&B/ hip hop genre. This question helped to notice how much our generation was interested in R&B music. We already assumed that we would get most of the votes in favour of doing R&B because of popular, current artists such as Drake and Beyonce. This reflected in the results: where 80% (15 people) said that they did like R&B/hip hop music and only 20% (3 people) saying they didn't. The people that didn't like R&B music could still answer the questions objectively.
Question 2&3: What is your gender/age?
We then went on to ask these personal questions about the respondents because we wanted to get an idea of who we were targeting our music video at. For gender, it didn't really matter if there were more boys or more girls, this would just determine how we would represent our R&B (female) artist, in regards to would we make her look more provocative, like some of the music videos we analysed, or more like a strong, independent woman. Overall we found that more women answered the questionnaire than men but only by 10% or so, this wasn't much of a 'game changer' in influencing what way we would go in representing our artist. In regards to age, from previous experience, we assumed that there wasn't a set age of people that were interested in R&B music but we found that the age group that had most interest in the music industry and were most active in watching music videos and following artists, were aged 16 - 21. However we did get responses from people who were over the age of 30 and under 16 which made us consider making it more age appropriate.
Question 4: What is your ethnicity?
We found that from this question the majority of people who answered were white/caucasian. This contributed to the representations within our music video because, without stereotyping too much, we needed to know whether we would include more 'gang' type scenes or parties at houses. We would consider this when we are looking at the locations and constructing our story line.
Question 5: what would you expect to see in a R&B/hip hop music video?
This question was probably one of the main influences in the construction of our music video. This question provided us with ideas about casting, costumes, location and props. The most popular theme that came through about R&B music videos was the idea of having dancing from the artist and back up dancers. We have made sure to incorporate this into our music video as it was the most popular response. The answers also valued a narrative story line and multiple locations and costumes, which we also saw was consistent in the R&B music videos we looked at such as Rihanna ft Drake:What's my name? We found that a range of costumes and locations added to the production value thus making the music video more lucrative, which seemed fitting for a R&B artist.
Question 6: What is your current favourite music video?
We decided to include this question to get inspiration and a visual of what our audience saw was the perfect representation of a R&B artist. This guided our ideas in how we were going to show of the artist and where we were going to put them in the music industry. This question came back with answers such as J Cole, Nikki Minaj and Ciara which was perfect for the theme of the typical R&B artist. This question confirmed what we already assumed about what our audience saw as perfect for including and representing our music video and artist.
Question 7: Do you recognise the artist Fergie?
This was closely related to our first question, because we got the same split of results 80:20. 80% knew who Fergie was and obviously these were the people who said that they were interested in the R&B music industry. We included this question to give our audience an idea of what we were going for with the artist and also whether they recognised her as a R&B artist. We used this question to give an overall summary of what the questions were aimed at when we were trying to represent different aspects.
Question 8: What comes to mind when you listen to the song 'Glamorous' by Fergie? what would you like to see in a music video promoting this single? Glamorous - Fergie (audio)
The general connotations of glamour were big writing lit up and attractive, stylish people in a variety of locations. The feedback indicated that the attention is always kept on Fergie and she was idealised by men around her. This feeds into the idea of emphasising the artist and representing them as the main focus in the music video at all times by using camera and staging techniques. The respondents also said that they wanted to see a connection to the GTA V video game in regards to the sexualisation of women in this game such as lingerie and 'sassy' dance moves.
