Rock music is a genre
of popular music that originated as Rock and Roll in 1950s. Rock developed into
a range of different styles in the 1960s and later, particularly in the United
Kingdom and the United States. It’s heavily influenced by Rhythm and
blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a
number of other genres such as blues andfolk, and incorporated
influences fromjazz, classical
and other musical sources. A rock
band usually consists of 2 to 5 members. The members would be expected to play
the electric guitar, bass guitar, or drums. They may also be the lead vocalist
and there may be a band member playing the piano or keyboard.
Composed by
Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and Robert Plant in the early 1970s, "Stairway
To Heaven" became the band's signature song, a permanent fixture on FM
radio playlists for decades to come, and one of the most famous rock songs of
all time. This song features the stereotypical conventions you would expect to
find in a rock song such as electric guitar solos. However when you compare the
song to modern rock songs you can easily distinguish the difference. Therefore
this shows that as time has gone on, rock has changed, therefore each
generation will be listening to a different type of rock.
For example
a modern indie rock band “The Killers”, formed in 2001. If you were to compare
a song by the killers and a song by Led Zeppelin, you would notice a huge
difference. But they both still appeal to a mass audience as they are
successful bands of their times. As the killers have been successful I decided
to apply some of their aspects to my music video and ideas. They are an indie
rock band and the song I’m using comes from an indie rock band, therefore some
of the conventions will fit nicely with my project. For instance the killers
use a mixture of performance and narrative in their music videos. We will apply
this hybrid to our music video as our target audience will be able to recognize
the typical style of an indie rock music video. Furthermore they have four band
members: Brandon Flowers – lead vocals,
keyboards, piano, bass guitar, Dave Keuning – lead guitar, backing vocals, Ronnie Vannucci, Jr. – drums, percussion,
backing vocals, Mark Stoermer – bass guitar, backing vocals, guitar.
The Killers made it big in the UK first, then
grew internationally famous one of the reasons they made it this big could be
their appeal to a wide range of target audience. They are now popular around
the world, however the countries with the biggest audience are the UK and US.
The age majority for their target audience is teens to mid 20's which like
similar indie rock artists. The
audience's hobbies may include playing rock music, Guitar Hero, Video games,
Sports. The audience consists of mixed sexes, very close to half and half it is
hard to tell by the massive size of the target audience. Many will be likely to
attend gigs, concerts and festivals of the same genre. The majority could
possibly be fans of other similar artists such as Franz Ferdinand, The Strokes,
Coldplay, Muse and The Arctic Monkeys.
Apart from teens, an age that will also be particularly interested are
people who were influenced by 80's alternative and electro rock music which The
Killers were also influenced by. The
target audience would mainly download albums and songs online due to the
introduction of easy and quick access to songs. However older parts of the
target audience would go out at physically buy the album over the counter as it
is the way of buying music they have grown up with and the traditional way to
buy an album, this method of buying music is dying down though due to p2p file
sharing and itunes making songs easy and fast to download at an instance rather
than going out to find a record shop to buy the CD as a result of this many
record stores are disappearing from high streets.
Some of The
Killers target audience could be inexperienced bands of Alternative / Indie
Rock that have looked at The Killers as inspiration for their own music and how
they might inspire to be as big as The Killers.
As the
Killers are a successful indie rock band, who
appeal to a target audience of teens and people in their mid 20’s; it is
likely that we will manufacture our music video, digipak and magazine cover to
appeal to that age range as well. As the audience will consist of mixed sexes
the colours on the digipak and magazine cover would have to be neutral,
therefore they will appeal to both males and females. However the focus has to
be on the group that will go out and buy the album over the counter and these
people will be the older part of the target audience. Therefore it’s crucial
that the album cover appeals to them, so instead of having bright colours, we
consider using earthy and darker colours.
Bradley Norris
Bradley Norris
