Further Focus Group Research

What they like about music videos.

We decided to ask our focus group about the music videos they said were their favourite ones. We asked them what it was about their favourite videos that appealed to them to see if there were in similarities in their answers.

We discovered that there were similarites in their answers as they all said that they like their favourite videos because the videos go along with the songs.

This is going to be useful when we decide on what we want to include in our music video because we'll know that if we make the video and song go together then it would be more appealing then if they weren't related.

Representation of the band or artist.

Everyone in our focus group said that they liked seeing the band or artist in the music video, so we decided to ask them how they liked to see the band or artist represented.

We wanted to ask them this because if they like seeing the band or artist in the music video then it is obviously important how we choose to represent them if they are going to be looking out for the band or artist.

The answers were, in general, fairly similar. 3 members of our focus group said that they liked to see the band or artist as normal, everyday people. This shows us that it might be useful to show the band in normal situations and have a fairly simple narrative as opposed to making the storyline unrealistic. However, one member of the focus group said that they just liked to see the band in sync with the song. This tells us that sometimes whether the band are shown as being better then everyday people or not isn't what's important. Sometimes what's important is just if the video fits with the genre or not.

Importance of seeing the band in the music video

We asked the focus group whether or not it would influence their opinion if the band wasn't in our music video.

The reason we decided to ask this was because we wanted to know how important it was to include the band in the video so that we'd know if we should include the band in it.

What we found was that the majority of our focus group wouldn't mind if the band wasn't shown in the video, but one person said that they would like to see the band so that they could relate the music to a certain person/group of people. What this tells us is that it might be better if we did include the band, because one person did feel strongly that seeing the band was important and everyone else didn't mind.

The narrative of our video.

The next question we asked was aimed specifically at the members of our focus group who said that they liked narrative based music videos. We asked them what kind of narrative they liked.

The reason we asked them this is so that we knew what sort of narratives we could include in our music videos that would appeal to our audience.

2 of the 3 people we asked said that they liked a story that was relevant to the song, the other member of our focus group said that they liked the story to have a proper meaning. This tells us that it might be good to have a proper storyline in our music video, but one that is related to the song.

Backstage footage in a live music video.

Because one member of our focus group said that they liked live music videos we decided to ask them if they liked to see backstage footage as well as the band performing.

We wanted to ask them this because if we did choose to include live footage we'd need to know what our audience would prefer.

What we found was that he'd prefer to see the band backstage because it shows that they're real people. This is useful as most of our focus group did say that they wanted to see the band as normal people so if we wanted to show this we could show the band backstage in the video.


Elizabeth :)