Research Questionnaire and Results

I conducted a questionnaire asking participants some demographics information, various questions about their consumption of music video content, and their opinions about music videos. Here I shall show the results of this questionnaire of 29 participants and analyse the data produced with regards to planning a music video of my own.

The questions I used:

Below are the results of each question and any conclusions I can draw from them in order to make a music video more appealing to the audience.

Here it is evident that the majority of the participants are young adults, and a not insignificant amount are older teens. While this question is itself related to music video, the results tell me that I should make a video more appealing to young adults more than any other demographic.

A large majority of the sample said that they watch music videos either often or sometimes. This means that it is worth using resources making a music video as there is a receptive audience.

This is an important question as it I can see what the collectively most popular genre is within my sample. The results show that the most people prefer indie/alternative music, with pop also being favoured by a large chunk of the sample. Therefore, it would make sense for me to make a video for a indie or alternative song rather than for a song in a niche genre like country/folk as more people are likely to enjoy the music video. However, if I was already set on making a video for a pop song, it could still do well due to the large number of pop fans.

He the chart shows that people in my sample prefer music videos focused on a narrative. Therefore I should try implement some kind of story into my music video for the audience to follow. I could also appeal to more people by choose multiple styles by cutting between a narrative and performance shots, or by creating an animated narrative.

Before creating the questionnaire, I was already interesting in making a narrative style music video so I decided to include a question specific to this style. I noticed that many narrative music videos have unclear endings left up to the audience's interpretation and wondered whether my sample would prefer this to a more clear cut ending to the story. The results show that more people would prefer a clear ending, however this option won by a slim majority as 40% of the participants said they prefer an unclear ending. Because of this, I would consider both options and choose depending on which fits better with my narrative as well as the song.

It is hard to represent the qualitative data from this question using a chart or graph. However, after reading the responses, it is clear that many of the participants liked it when their chosen video linked to the lyrics and and when the timing matched that of the music, so I would conclude that I should make a video which is closely linked to the song thematically and through its pace and timing.

The data from this question is also qualitative so I will again summarise the results by looking at trends in the answers given. There are two main aspects of this music video that people enjoyed. One is the colour or aesthetics of the video, usually referring to the use of black and white in the video or the vintage style. Out of the 29 responses, 11 mentioned that they liked the use of colour or the video's vintage aesthetic. The second aspect of the video that people praised was the story, which garnered 10 mentions in 10 of the 29 responses. Other than simply bringing it up as a general positive, people mentioned that the story itself was interesting and that it kept them hooked. As a result of these findings, I would attempt to create a convincing and intriguing narrative in my music video (not something generic or typical) and also make the video stand out with a distinct visual style (through colour or perhaps some other means) as these were the 2 key points of praise for the video I asked my sample group to watch.

Overall, I think combining the ideas and decisions made from the findings would result in a good video which is appealing to my sample and by extension to the video's eventual audience.