Evaluation: Question Four

Who would be the audience for your media product?

Initially, my planned target audience was the so-called "raver" crowd. Mostly composed of young, middle class people, my profiling was based around the party culture of places like Ibiza, which are infamous for their wild holidaymakers, copious amounts of alcohol and drugs, and music that one could only dance to if one had recently consumed said alcohol and drugs. These people, I assumed, would be fairly undemanding music-wise, mostly listening to it as a kind of "audio-wallpaper". Besides, I thought many of them would be too stoned out of their minds to care anyway. I would therefore design a magazine that drew this audience in with flashy colours and bold font, before giving them basic information about upcoming events and acts. In short, a low-brow magazine for a low-brow audience.

However, several things made me change this view of my audience. Firstly, I realised that the ravers I would be selling to might find out about the events via other methods, and they might not read much; this made seeling to them look like a bad idea. Secondly, I found that the supposedly simple rave music I had chosen to base my magazine on was far more complex than I had expected, and that there might be more "hardcore" fans of it than the typical raver. Thirdly, I had already started making the magazine, and my natural leaning towards intellectual discussion meant it was too high brow for my original audience. So, I changed the focus of my magazine away from rave music to the more encompassing electronic music and marketed it towards the serious fans instead. These fans take a great deal more interest in the music side of the rave scene; they might well play an instrument (most likely a synthesizer) or show an interest in being a DJ. They would need to be techno-savvy in order to operate these musical instruments. Most likely they would drink and take drugs like my first audeince, but never to excess. In short, they are the serious fans of electronic music, and they expect a serious magazine, which is what I was making.