Audience Essay

I'll be looking at Coldplay's videos and also the age of the fans that listen to Coldplay's music. For my music video, i chose the song The Scientist - Coldplay because i found that the words told a story in which i could create a video to go along to. It's also quite an emotional song so the story that i created to go along with it could also be quite emotional with a deep meaning to it.
Coldplay's target audience showed surprising figures when i looked at their demographics. Supposedly their biggest fan base lies in the ages of 12-17 years old. Something i really didn't expect. Looking at images of fans in a queue waiting to see Coldplay or at a concert singing along to their music i found that most images showed fans aged around 20-30 years old. On Myspace, Coldplay has 444,965 fans, followed by another 293,283 fans on Facebook. Both social networks show a mixed range of all ages, as young as 15 to as old as 40. Looking at the demographics to see which gender preferred to listen to Coldplay, the graph showed very close results. 52% of males listened to Coldplay in comparison to 48% of females.

Coldplay's competitors are most likely to be new, young and upcoming bands. Most new bands have their own style of music and a unique sound so this is what Coldplay will be competing against. They have recently brought out their new album Viva La Vida with a different and fresh sound. They have to make sure to produce music that fans of all ages can enjoy, so far their new album is doing well, selling 300,000 copies in the first three days it was released. By joining up with people such as Kylie for their 2009 album, this will promote Coldplay and bring them more fans. Also, as well as Coldplay fans buying their albums, Kylie Minogue fans will be too.

Coldplay's music label is EMI, they have been with them since 1999. Staying with this music label has helped Coldplay to have a growing career and very popular albums and songs amongst their fans.
Coldplay are compared to bands such as Radiohead, U2 and Travis. In a way it is good for the alternative rock band to be compared to other bands that are similar. This way they will gain fans that enjoy listening to the likes of Radiohead, U2 and Travis.

All of these bands are very similar and the sounds they produce are also very similar to each other. U2 is one of the biggest bands worldwide, they are cross generation and cross age. Not only do teenagers listen to them, teenagers parents or older siblings listen to them and remember their music in their earlier stages. By being similar to U2 and staying with EMI, Coldplay could find themselves following in U2’s footsteps and being a cross- generation, cross- age band.

I'm going to set my target audience for people aged for 16+. I think people of this age or upwards will be able to relate to the video and understand the concept of it, rather than someone that is under 16 and might not fully understand the video or be able to relate to it in some way.
Personally, i think that Coldplay's fans are at more mature ages, so by following this, hopefully i will get the reaction that their videos do.