Target Audience

When any new single or album is released from a well known or new artist, they have to define their target audience to make sure they appeal to the right age groups in order to sell their product. They do this by using demographic and psychographic profiling which includes many different sections. Once they have defined who they are appealing to, the artist or artists can work on their brand image to get themselves well known and in some cases, well known artists change their brand image over time so they can appeal to more than one audience at a time.

Indie music appeals to many different people. Oasis are an indie band when they started and they still are but they appealed to the mass audience which meant that they were well known whereas, some indie bands are just well known in the percentage that enjoy the music. However, indie is fast becoming a relevant sub-genre as the bands are appearing more and more on mainstream music channels.

Our Target Audience


As shown by the questionnaires, we are appealing to teenagers between the ages of 15-25. This is a relevant age as it has been proven that teenagers and young adults are the main group in society to listen and watch the most music and all types of music. To define our target audience, we have used GRASS, (Gender, Race, Age, Socio-economic Status). This is the easiest way to define our target audience.

Gender: If you only appeal to a male audience or a female audience then you are excluding half of the population and this won't help your artist. Our music video and brand will appeal to everyone to make sure no-one is excluded.

Race: Every music product appeals to every race, it depends on the person whether they choose the Indie sub-genre over the Pop genre. Our music product will appeal to everyone.

Age: Ideally, our target audience will be between the ages of 15 and 25 year olds. This is the best group as they listen and watch more music videos than any other age group. They are also the group which go to the most concerts, gigs, festivals, and live performances.

Socio-economic Status: There are 6 groups which target audiences are put into depending on there job/occupation. For our target audience, we have decided to go with C1 to E as it is mainly teenagers and young adults which fit into these groups. We are missing out A and B as these are the groups for adults who have professional jobs and management jobs.

A - Upper Class - Business Professionals
B-  Middle Class - Middle Management

C1 - Lower Middle Class - Trades and supervisory jobs
C2 - Skilled Working Class - Blue Collar Workers
D - Lower Working Class - Manual Workers
E - Subsidence - Pensioners and the unemployed. 


Every artist has a primary target audience and a secondary target audience. They have to appeal to a secondary target audience otherwise the band is excluding 50 per cent of the population. The ideal secondary target audience will be both genders between the ages of 35 and 50 years old as they have grown up with the likes of The Clash, The Jam, The Buzzcocks and Prince.  The secondary target audience will also include all the socio-economic status, A-E, where our primary target audience only include C1 to E.


Demographic Profiling


Demographic profiling is very similar to socio-economic status as it involves grouping the audience into smaller groups based on variables such as age, gender, geographical area, class, economics and sexuality.

Geographic Area: It doesn't matter where the audience is from or where they live, every audience has access to different music. However, Indie music does appear more in the North than the South.

Sexuality: Indie music appeals to all audiences. This is to make sure that we don't exclude anyone.

Psychographic Profiling

Psychographic profiling consists of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which clearly addresses audience segmentation, and Young and Rubicam's Cross-cultural Consumer Characteristics, which approaches characteristics in people in terms of their personal aspirations. These are very important when defining your target audience.

Our music video will be aimed at our target audience and will fulfill their basic needs of Love/Belonging, Self-Esteem and Self-Actualization. Our music video will complete these as the audience wants friendship and feeling close to others by talking about the music they enjoy and the videos they keep on watching. Music videos and our music video creates confidence, respect of others and by others and it will develop self-esteem as audiences may talk to people they don't know about the music they like and it will also make them feel good about themselves by comparing their lives against the characters lives. Hopefully, our music video will develop self-actualization by showing creativity, problem solving and acception of how other people are.

Young and Rubicam's Cross-cultural Consumer Characteristics

To define our target audience, we use the 4 sections of these characteristics to make sure we appeal to the right audiences.

Mainstreamers: We have used this to define our target audience as our music product needs to appeal to the mass audiences and as our genre is indie, we have decided to include Rock as well to appeal to the wider audiences.

Aspirers: This has been included when we defined our target audience as audiences are motivated by status, word of mouth and what is popular with other audiences.

Niche consumer markets and lifestyle groupings also define audiences. Our target audience niche is:

• ¨      Kippers – Kid’s in parents’ pockets eroding retirement savings.
• ¨      Lombard – Loads of money but a real donut.
• ¨      Ninja – No income, No job or assets.
• ¨      Snag – Sensitive new age guy.
• ¨      Snert – Snot-nosed egostical rude teenager. 

By Romany