Audience research - Demographics

Demographics are memorable characteristics of media consumers such as age, gender, race, education and income level or occupation. It is a common and traditional method of audience research that uses the populations statistical information, their characteristics and the work that they do to distinguish different groups of people.(These groups are shown in the table below.) By looking at these demographics, it helps an institution to understand how to target a product to a specific audience which then allows them to shape their product to appeal to this group with known viewing habits.

A - Upper Middle Class

Predominantly, upper class people are more associated with listening to classical music. It is expected that when one visits the opera, people will not be dressed in tracksuits, because these people would generally be from a lower class, such as D, or E. There are very few classical music videos on YouTube, which reflects the lifestyle of the people from this class. They might not have time to watch music videos, therefore there is no need to produce them.

B - Middle Class - 

C1 - Lower Middle class - People in this class

C2 - Skilled working Class - 

D - Working Class - Generally, people from the working class tend to listen to music that is presented too them. This means that their music taste will consist of chart music because of the environment that they are in. The radio might play whilst at work, meaning that this musical style start to become recognisable, therefore appealing. However, this might mean that they listen to forms of rock in order to escape the work environment. 

E - Casual/Lowest grade workers - These people may listen to music which they feel reflects their lifestyle, such as rap music, or merely consume what if fed to them on chart shows.

A graduate  student from a company called "CalTech" did some research which studied the relationship between musical styles and bands and the SAT scores of the people who listened to them. He found that the smartest students listened to Beethoven (average SAT of 1371) and the students who rung in at the bottom of the SAT scores listened to Lil’ Wayne (average SAT of 889). This can be seen in the chart of results below:

This leaves several questions unanswered in relation to cause and effect. Do you choose music based on your intelligence? Is it related to the individual's personality? Can listening to certain types of music heighten, or lessen your intelligence? Do people gravitate towards a certain type of music because they are smart and think that it will make them seem smarter?  However, it does show a correlation between music preference, and intelligence. This is useful when analysing which genres of music are more popular in relation to where they stand when considering what demographic they are in. It gives an insight into the relationship between social class and music preference, because it is likely that someone working in a managerial position would have a higher SAT score than an unskilled manual worker. 

Gerry Veenstra (author and professor at UBC's Department of sociology) states that: “Breadth of taste is not linked to class. But class filters into specific likes and dislikes”. 

http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/str-musc.html

C1-D

I aim for my product to appeal to people from these demographics. 

http://musicmachinery.com/2014/02/10/gender-specific-listening/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3138530/figure/F1/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3138530/table/T1/

my product

different radio stations

what they play

who listens to them. what demographic? How the station reflects the demographic

which station my song would play on