Audience Research

By Victor Chi-Chung Chan

Aim of this survey

By asking questions in these directions: • Understanding what are the people who buy these music magazine.

• What kind of music magazine they would like to buy.

• The purchasing power of the audience.

• What kind of contents they want to get form the magazines.

Therefore, we can design our own magazine that fits the specific audience with the specific contents.

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Planning: Before asking questions, we must design how do we ask

to get the most efficient results from the audience.

Basic information: Gender, age and occupation are essential before asking any question, so that we know what kind of people are we asking.

Tendency: By asking them what do they want without any premise, to understand what do the audience like.

The actual situation: By the personal limits, the moods of them in buying magazines might have changed.

Such as: What magazine do they prefer.

Which price is reasonable.

Such as: What magazine did they actually buy. How much do you spend for each magazine.

Comparison

Conclusion: Then we will know what do they prefer and how are they affected by other factors.

Compliment questions: Some simple questions are not comparable but useful.

Survey Results

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What is your gender?

This question can tell what does the data in the following questions reflect. Different genders may have different attitudes or taste towards music. I also want to know what gender would like to do this questionnaire because it may tell whether they are interested in music or not.

Total 41 people answered this survey. The responses are quite satisfying as the ratio of male to female are quite balanced (3:2), so the following data are able to reflect both genders of audience.

Since they are not exactly the same, so the data tends to reflect the attitude of male.

Which age range are you?

Different age ranges can reflect their orientation towards music. Some music genres are defined as ‘old-fashioned’, such as classical, and some of them are new in this generation, such as pop. By this question, it decides our target audience of this project as we know what they like.

From the result, it is revealed that age range 18-25 dominates, which has 26 people out of 41 (63.41%). Under 18 is the next which is 31.71%. The least is 26-35 which has 2 out of 41 (4.88%). We may ignore them since they are the minority.

By calculation, the mean value of their age is ~18.02, so the data reflect the young adults. Then we may focus on the audience around 18.

Which of the following best describes your current occupation?

Occupation is related to the age, we can guess what’s the age range by their occupation, vice versa. But this question also reflects the purchasing power. We assume that the more purchasing power, the more money they would spend on magazine. Also the career directly tells how much they earn.

In this survey, total 29 people are students (26 of them shown in the data, 3 of them commented ‘student’ in the bar), around 70% respondents are students. So we can assume the overall purchasing power of them are quite low since they would not work full time so they don’t earn much.

Combine the data in last question, we can assume most of them are under higher education. They are knowledgeable, but they may not like to buy music magazine very often.

Students

How often do you buy a music magazine?

This question shows how often did they actually buy music magazines.

It reflects two possibilities, their attitude towards music (how much they love music) and their purchasing power. The more often they buy means they have higher purchasing power or they love music.

In the following data, most respondents never bought any music magazine or irregularly, each of them is more than 30%. After them is ‘once a week’ which is 14.63%. The data is quite extreme, they seem either not buying or buying quite frequently.

The main reason we can estimate according to their age and occupation. Since most of them may not have much purchasing power so they are not willing to buy music magazine regularly. They would not even buy them due to the internet can deliver all the information in the magazine.

What genre of music magazine do you usually buy?

After knowing the data about how would they spend money on music magazine, then we want to know their expectation in music magazine. By asking them about their favourite genres, we will know what kind of magazines they would like to buy.

According to the data, the most popular genre is Rock, 60.53%. After that are Pop and Metal, which are 42.11% and 26.32% respectively. These three genres are viewed more likely popular to teenagers and young adults. This is a quite expected result. Instead, the rest of them are classical, jazz and country music, those are viewed boring, or old-fashioned.

Therefore, the genres of magazine I focus on should be Rock, Pop or Metal.

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What music magazine do you prefer the most? (Seven is the most, One is the least)

Different magazines focus on different genres of music and also target audience. From these options, mostly are for teenagers or young adults. Only ‘others’ could include non-British magazine. Due to their similar genres, the respondents may like many of them. So they were asked to arrange those magazines by how much they prefer.

The rating of them all are quite high. Possibly the respondents are mostly British. NME is the most preferred (4.83), followed by Metal Hammer and Classic Rock (4.63), then Kerrang! (4.54). These four magazines are the most preferred by young adults. The rest of their rating are lower than 4, the reasons can be estimated by the following questions. So far we know these four magazines attracts them the most.

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What music magazine did you actually buy?

There are magazines they prefer, but ‘want to buy’ and ‘would buy’ are different. So this question might tell what’s the difference between they prefer music magazines and they do actually buy it.

According to the result, almost half of them have never bought of them, followed by Kerrang!, which has 39.02% support. The rest of them are lower than 20%. The results are quite unexpected, the magazines they prefer are different to the magazines they actually bought.

That can be conjectured as the price decides what they buy. Since most of them are just students, may not have much purchasing power, so they don’t buy music magazines. Then the price of Kerrang! is quite cheap, that’s why they would buy Kerrang! rather than the others.

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Comparison: Their tendency and their purchasing power.

From the last two questions - ‘What music magazine do you prefer the most?’ and ‘What music magazine did you actually buy?’. We do see the content and the price of the magazines do affect what would they buy. NME, Metal Hammer, Kerrang! and Classic Rock seem to be the most popular magazines in this survey, so we now compare the difference among them.

Kerrang! has the least popularity among these four but most people have bought this magazine. Of course, the probability that some respondents randomly answered this survey is not excluded. People would like to buy Kerrang! may be due to their attractive covers, or the cheaper price. NME has the similar price to Kerrang! but that’s probably NME doesn't focus on a specific genre (Rock, the most popular genre in their age range) like Kerrang! does. So the respondents would like to buy Kerrang! instead of NME.

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Which price range is the most reasonable for a regular music magazine?

This question directly reflects their purchasing power, which also directly decides them whether buying this magazine or not.

The results is quite predictable. People tend to buy magazines with cheaper price, especially the price range - £2.01-3 is the most chosen one (30.77%). Then options - ‘below £2’, ‘£3.01-4’ and ‘£4.01-5’ share the same percentage (20.51%).

It answered to the question why Kerrang! is the most people bought. Because of its cheap price - £2.20, so they would like to buy it. The result also suggest the purchasing power of students is quite low as expected.

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How much do you spend for each regular music magazine?

This is a similar question to the previous one. It estimates that is t h e i r c o n s u m p t i o n o n m u s i c magazines reasonable as they expect.

The result is quite optimistic, the cheapest options - ‘below £2’, ‘£2.01-3’ and ‘£3.01-4’ share the same percentage (25.64%) and the data are quite similar to the last question. They also tend to spend less money on music magazine.

The reason due to the price of each magaz ine would never be so expensive. They almost cannot find a magazine with £10 or above. Also they are only students, so they would not spend so much money on music magazine.

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Which section of a magazine attracts you the most?

This is a complement question. Because the whole survey focuses a lot on what genre, what magazine they buy, or how the price affects their decisions. But this question wants to know what’s so attractive to them in a music magazine. This is more likely a comparison between the contents in a magazine.

‘Interviews’ is the most chosen option, which has 42.5%, followed by ‘News’ and ‘Reviews’ are 22.5% and 17.5% respectively. ‘Promotion of products’ and ‘Gig guide’ don't seem attractive to them.

It reflects people tend to get informative contents in a magazine. Especially interviews are usually exclusive by the magazines, so they can only know the conversation by reading the magazine. But reviews and news they can read by other resources. So even though they are important but still not attractive as interviews.

Conclusion

In this survey, we found the characteristics of the audience that helps us design our own magazine.

Most respondents are students and young adults around 18. Males are more than females about a half. So the purchasing power is quite low due to they focus on their study instead of working, their income does not support them to buy so much non-essentials.

As a result, they tend to buy cheaper magazine, even the quality is not good as they expected. Or they don’t even buy magazine.

But not all the phenomenon can be explained by its price. The contents in a magazine also affect them. Possibly due to the convenience of the Internet to them, the importance of magazines to spread the news has been weakened. So the audience tend to read more exclusive articles/interviews instead of news.

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