Target audience research /Updates

Target market is an extremely important factor as we can understand and try to relate to the audience, reaching out to our target audience successfully will have a correlation to sales and success of promotion. Each of our tasks will have to appeal to the target audience of the artist we have chosen. After researching into the target audience of our artist's genre, hip hop / dub-step which both umbrella under the urban scene, i can conclude there is no conscious about hip hop demographics. A lot of information I found was from America, as of course this is where the vast majority of hip/hop music resides although British hip - hop in the 21st century is up and coming, Plan B, a British urban artist, is certainly an anomaly in his field; could our product attempt to reach out to this vast market?

From wikipedia -
British hip hop was greatly influenced by United States’ hip hop. Hip hop music throughout the world is influenced by the United States hip hop but none are as similar as are the British and the US forms. The cultural diversity that exists in both these countries seems to be the relationship that makes them so comparable. The different cultures within these two countries are each creating their own form of hip hop individually. The effect of multi-cultural countries on music seems to be cross collaboration with the end result being a blending of all the different cultures. This merging of music puts the resultant hip hop from both the US and the UK on the top of the charts.

A statement I found on this hip hop website stated :
The global hip hop community: twenty four million people between the ages of 19-34, from a range of nationalities, ethnic groups and religions. Their collective spending power is $500 billion annually in the U.S. alone.

This age range seams ish appropriate to me, initally 34 feels too old of Plan B's genre, I would suggest that Plan B's fan base is the lower end of that age range, 19 - 29, an age range of young adults who would hear the track at clubs and bars to a slightly older generation but still below the age of having children etc as I believe this would definitely determine which music you brought and how much you listened to it. It my eyes anyway.

Another idea surfaced in a hip hop blog located here , giving the demographic Males 18 - 30.

However these age ranges for hip hop genre fails to be specific to our artist, which is a key point. I tried to look into the demographics for our chosen artists however this did not produce any reliable results. I decided that a reliable way to determine that our target audience is correct is to look on last fm. A website dedicated to tracking the listeners of artists.

Plan B is the second most popular British Hip Hop artist.
Chase and Status are one of the top Drum n Bass artists

The two artists profiles are hosted here (Plan B) and here (Chase and Status)

Chase and Status top listeners: Male 27, Female 17, Male 20, Male 25, Male, 20, Male 15, Male 18, Male 33

Plan B listeners: Male 25, Male 23, Male 21, Male 21, Male 17, Female 16, Male 23, Male 23, Male 18, Male 33
Plan B & Chase and Status top listeners - Male 27, Male unknown age, Male 20, Male 25, Male 18, Female 19, Male 20, Female unknown age, Male 20, Male 20

I took each of these print screens from the first page of 'Most Recent Listeners' The results were unanimous that Males aged 18 - 27 were the main target age group. The target audience will also be listeners of hip hop & drum and bass music. Females are part of the market yet they are not the audience we will be mainly targeting our product toward.

To conclude, our target market is Males aged 18 - 27 who are fans of hip hop / drum and bass music.