Planning Research:
Primary Research:
I will need to do some primary research on the track that I have chosen from the artist to understand my audience's expectations for the music video in this single . I will also need to research the reception of the track and lyrics to make sure that the video I will be creating will match my audience's needs, according to the Blumler and Katz's Uses and Gratifications theory.
I will be completing:
- An online survey to my target audience (13-17)
- Interviews with an audience member to understand how this track is portrayed and explore what they recognises in the current music videos and what they dislike as seeming out-dated or unrealistic to avoid this.
- A separate survey with a different sample to get an idea of what the audience think the content and meaning of the song is.
Secondary Research:
To balance my research I will also need to understand the single in industry to understand what type of video will fit. I will research how much the single cost to make, which album it is from and the critical reception (what people who are also artists think about it). This would help me understand how this single might compare to other tracks made by the same artist. If it is very different I will need to make a very different video. Once I have finished this, I will sample videos from Billie Eilish to try to understand what her videos are like and see if they have a style or a pattern that they often follow or use similar techniques that are used all the time such as close-ups or performances. I will also sample current music videos to research if there is a frequent style/vibe at the moment to make sure that my video is modern and up-to-date. This would allow me to adjust or come up with a suitable idea for the artist.
I will be completing:
- Research on the artist on their website or social media and look up how many studio albums they have released and their success.
- Research the reception of this track or album and review the sources.
- Research and sample videos from the artist to see if there is a certain style or pattern,
- Research and sample current tracks released at the same time and their videos to understand my competition and the market in general.
Chosen song:
Completing Research:
First, I visited Billie Eilish's website to understand the track I had chosen from their latest studio album.
https://www.billieeilish.com/
https://www.billieeilish.com/
Research on Artist's recent sales:
According to billboard Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas (also her producer) were the big winners of the 2020 Grammy Awards, as they took home five trophies each at the Jan. 26 ceremony. Sales of Eilish's albums and songs went high in the U.S, according to initial sales reports to Nielsen Music. Eilish broke the record of being the first woman, and second artist ever, to win the top four categories in the same year: album of the year for: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, record of the year, song of the year both for: Bad Guy, and best new artist. Eilish also took home the best pop vocal album trophy also for: When We All Fall Asleep where do we go?. In total, Eilish’s catalog of albums and songs sold 15,000 copies on January the 26 – up by 109% compared to the 7,000 they sold on January the 25th. Eilish’s two albums: When We All Fall Asleep, and Don’t Smile at Me sold a little more than 2,000 copies on January the 26th (which was about 46% more from the 2,000 on the previous day. Meanwhile her songs sold 13,000 downloads (increasing by 127% from 6,000). Isolating just When We All Fall Asleep and Bad Guy, they were gains of about 54% (2,000 sold, up from 1,000) and an estimated 202% (4,000 sold, up from 1,000). So far Billie has won 112 awards for her released albums and 48 awards for her singles.
It is clear the Billie does much better with her whole albums than her singles. This shows how important it is that many singles are released to promote it. This shows me that this music video needs to be unique and different to grab the audience's attention and appeal to them. My research from assignment 2 was a great hit and a cinematography award winner alongside having above 1 Billion Spotify Streams and so I would need to try and gain most of my inspiration from it in order for the artist to have more success with her singles.
From these charts we can see that her album "When we all fall asleep, where do we go?" had a massive success with over 3 Grammy awards and peaked to position 1 in over 7 countries.
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Billie has won an award for being second artist in Grammy history to win all four of the Big Four categories: best new artist, album of the year (for full-length debut When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?), song of the year and record of the year (both for "Bad Guy") This should mean that I should already have good brand loyalty and be able to gain recognition within my mass audience which could lead onto the video being well accepted by the fans.
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Research into chosen single:
Bury a friend was released on the 30th of January on 2019 as part of her newly released album: When we all go to sleep where do we go?. The record label of Bury a friend was buy Darkroom Interscope. the cost of producing this single was estimated to be around $500,000 or even more. Billie Eililsh and her brother Finneas were the main people who came up with the song and the music video and how they wanted Billie to be conveyed.
Overall the success that this track got 100% outweighing the amount it cost to make. So far Bury a friend has had over 347 million views with 6.7 million likes, approximately 29 million streams and 18,000 downloads in just the first week after it's release, later on resulting in over 15 million downloads. Compared to other tracks released by Billie this was considered a huge success. |
Research into Album
This album has proven to be different from the previously released albums, many have said that this album is much darker and has a much deeper meaning than the other albums released, in terms of the music videos and in terms of the lyrics. It has been marketed much differently from any other albums. It was marketed using many methods such as putting up the albums cover on may billboards and on many different social media platforms including things such as posts or stories put up by Billie herself and Finneas her producer.
Personally, I see this album similar the albums released before but one thing that I notice is that there is a much darker atmosphere and a much darker tone.
This album was marketed in more than one way. There were many ads on all social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter and promoted by more than one artists (Including Billie and her brother). Alongside there were many adverts seen on billboards and magazines.
Personally, I see this album similar the albums released before but one thing that I notice is that there is a much darker atmosphere and a much darker tone.
This album was marketed in more than one way. There were many ads on all social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter and promoted by more than one artists (Including Billie and her brother). Alongside there were many adverts seen on billboards and magazines.
Reception within my target audience
I've made a more specific target audience of 14-18 years as well as the large mass audience Billie Eilish already has. This would allow me to have access to new listeners who may have been too young or too old to listen to the artist before ). This could possibly help boost sales long term too. To do this, I completed primary research with my target market.
EvaluationThe tracks were listed in order of the most successful to the least according to the Billboard chart so I thought this would be obvious in the order of tracks for this audience. However, more people in my audience knew Idontwannabeyouanymore. I think this is because it was the first major successful song released by Billie so it got a lot of attention and publicity.
I also was not expecting the lyrics and video to be as important to the audience as they were. Without fail, every person ticked that the lyrics were important to liking an artist. No one chose the tours/shows which possibly suggests to me that live performances are less important to this audience than I thought it would be. This would also mean that I will need to ensure that the video is as perfected as possible as the live effect will not appeal to my target audience. All of my sample had heard of Billie which again showed me how much the artist had a huge audience and was recognized even with much older people. |
EvaluationThis survey for me personally was definitely harder to write and produce as the questions were more qualitative then quantitative and so not all the results were clear. More than half of my audience had heard the track before the survey which may have been not too helpful as they already had time to think about it and what it meant and compare it to other tracks or maybe even their opinion was influenced by others others. This has made my results somewhat unreliable and not completely accurate as it would have been more reliable if the audience had not heard heard the song before.
Most people (7/9) said that they liked the track. There was a huge variety of responses to what the song was about as many people had a different look on what the song may have been about. I have given some example quotes below. Most people agreed that the song was about Billie's ghost/monster that she is fighting in her sleep and that she is not afraid of.
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This primary research helped me to understand what my audience wanted and needed from the track, and also helped give me ideas of what the video might contain. Billie often uses videos with little narrative focusing on the performance, so that would work well with what the first survey told me about how appearance is important.. This could work well as a video and would be interesting I think, especially if it was mainly a performance.
Sampling videos:
I researched the videos from the top 5 singles and have uploaded them below [I didn't use Idontwannabeyouanymore as I used this for Assignment 2) . I used You should see me in the crown instead which was next on the list]. I have analysed them and I used these videos to conduct my interviews with my focus group (3 people) to think about what they liked/did not like.
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Focus group (primary research)
The group 2 males and 3 female (to account for the female bias of Pop) watched all 5 videos before the focus group began. Below were the main comments and opinions from the focus group.
- "I think all of her music is dark and more masculine which is what makes her really unique and unlike the usual pop music you would expect to see from Pop artists like Taylor Swift where they mainly do happy and bouncy music. I think it is very cool how she as a female is able to represent herself in such a powerful and dark way yet still have that many views and get so famous"
- "Personally I seem to find all of her music really dark and more emo which is usually very unsuccessful when the artist doesn't have as much variety yet with Billie, it's like whatever she puts out she has this special and unique touch to her performances and the whole meanings behind the music"
- "She seems to be more of a performance artist than a singer, all of her music videos are very interesting and modern which is entertaining to look at, however sometimes it gets a bit boring when there is just one scene throughout the whole video but I guess that's what a performance is"
- "I think she has this clever way when making her videos, she does not make any explicit meanings of what the video or the lyrics are about which allows the audience to interpret it however they like which is really smart as then she is targeting more people"
Evaluation:
- My audience enjoys the SFX used in Billie's videos and how every video holds a new style yet the same theme.
- Performance is still important, they need to feel they know who Billie is, her style being carried throughout her videos.
- Billie needs to include a wider variety with more scenes, the same theme and style of the video.
- they liked the theme and style that she carries through all of her videos, making her as an artist have a personal style/touch making her unique.
- They liked having different shots or unusual editing is good.
- They already know how to edit themselves so they want to be impressed by proper music videos and see something more "out of the blues".
Analysis of Music Videos for Billie Eilish:
Planning Proposal
Lyrics analysis
The lyrics mainly talks about how Billie isn't afraid of her monster and how the monster "underneath her bed" is confused as to why she isn't running away from it, I might consider using this as presenting Billie in an unexpected way showing how brave and powerful she could be. Also, in the lyrics Billie talks about wanting to 'end' herself which may suggest that she might be talking about her shadow, or even another version of herself.
How does this song represent the artist?
Concept Mood Board
Proposal Ideas
Feedback from target audience (primary research)
I wanted to be certain that this idea would appeal to my audience so I sent it to my friends who are within my target market. They listened to the track and then I explained my proposal and the mood board. They then gave me some feedback.:the notes are below. I have used this to improve my proposal to the final one.
Final Proposal
PITCHING A NEW PRODUCT
I pitched my product to my target audience and recorded the audio over the slides which is attached below.