Audience theory

The cultural studies Approach to Audience

According to Morley, audiences aren't just passively affected by media texts, they take an active role in reading a text. 

• Preferred reading: The audience recognize the values being offered by the text and accepts them as natural and correct. 

• Negotiated reading: The audience recognize the values in the text as legitimate and accept them in general, but adapt their reading of the text to fit in with their experiences and interest. 

• Oppositional reading: The audience understands the values of the text, but disagrees with them and rejects them. 

How might audiences read the values expressed in your video and print work in a preferred, negotiated and oppositional way? 

A preferred reading would be taken by our target audience, because they understand elements of the Indie genre and enjoy it. They would find our slightly entropic and comical element to our video entertaining and enjoy how the beat matched the editing of our video. 

A negotiated reading would be taken from people who are not part of our target audience but may enjoy the occasional Indie song. They wouldn't enjoy the entropic elements of the video but they would understand how it may be funny to some people. 

An oppositional reading might be produced by someone who doesn't like Indie music and would prefer a music video to link with the lyrics completely in terms of the storyline. 

What are you going to do to encourage the target audience to take a preferred reading?

To make our target audience take a preferred reading to our music video we are going to make sure Indie elements are clearly used and use a mixture of performance and narrative to anchor the audience into wanting to know what will happen next in the storyline. We will also include humorous elements that are clear, but cannot be taken offense to. Our characters will be dressed casually as part of the Indie genre and the face paint may draw in the audience and create a sense of interest.

What kind of person might take an oppositional reading?  

This may be a person who doesn't enjoy Indie music or indie conventions, such as relationship based narrative and humor. They will not be our intended target audience and wouldn't enjoy following a storyline. They may enjoy music videos that are mainly performance based or concept based.