Target Audience

Emocore as a genre has seen a huge surge in popularity since the late 90’s/early 2000’s with many bands, such as Jimmy Eat World, Brand New, Senses Fail and Taking Back Sunday finding success.

Its target audience in recent years seems to have been emotionally driven teenagers who base their taste in music on the degree by which they can relate to the lyrics in the songs as well as the emotions provoked by the thought provoking vocals and dramatic guitar.

Furthermore the traditional audience for such bands would be teenagers that have emotional difficulty and can use the emotional style of music as an outlet for their repressed emotion, often growing very attached to certain bands. An example of this is the exclusive fan group of popular emo band My Chemical Romance, named the ‘MCRmy’ which has thousands of members who consider themselves to be die hard fans of the band, and even claim that their music has helped them through hard times, or improved their life in some way.

Exclusive fan groups seem to be another way in which record companies and recording artists can extract more money from fans, such as the popular pop band McFly who have just today unveiled their new fan site ‘Super City’ which charges a membership fee of £40 a year.

However, as Jimmy Eat World have been signed to a major label for a while now their target audience has expanded greatly to almost all teenagers and young adults, even drawing in some older listeners too. Their single ‘The Middle’, which has been their most successful single to date peaked at number five in the charts and received airtime in several radio stations, along with the video being shown on large music channels such as MTV. This allowed for a greater distribution to a greater audience.

Now the target audience for the music of Jimmy Eat World is very general, simply calling out to anybody that takes an interest in either their sound or lyrics.

As far as audience demographics are concerned I believe our main target audience would be made up of teenagers, who will most likely still be in education and living with their parents. There is no particular gender bias within our target audience. Our target audience will also be single, and perhaps feel alone. I believe the typical psychographics of our target audience will be those who have a low sense of self-esteem and very little confidence. They will be the kind of people that can let their emotions out while listening to the emocore genre of music, as it leaves them in an emotionally charged state. Emocore aims to help those who find themselves depressed often, and need a release from bad emotions.

We aim to draw in this target audience through the emotional charge the song already contains, and by creating a video that reflects this emotion and has a very energetic yet dark feel, with emphasis on repressed emotion being brought to the surface and expressed.