YM- Reflection on Audience Research

Audience research is a great way to gain an insight as to what a general audience thinks of our chosen genre and their initial reactions to our track and first ideas. 
We chose to undertake our audience research as a survery on SurveyMonkey.  This is because it allowed us to ask different types of questions to be answered differently, depending on the type of response we were looking for.  We often asked our respondee's to tick boxes to inform us of their thoughts and ideas.
Here are a couple of examples of a 'tick the boxes that apply' question:

These questions were helpful because they allowed our respondees to select all that apply which is a positive thing because it is always possible for someone to have different views on something, maybe even contrasting.  We did get a response that contradicted themselves, selecting the 'Happy', 'Upbeat', 'Hopeful' and 'Pessimistic' which suggested to us that different parts of the song connoted different feelings.

We also had a rating question where we asked respondees to select on a scale depending on their personal opinion.  Here is the question:

This question worked well because it allowed more freedom for our respondees to give their thoughts on our ideas.
We only used closed questions except for the second question:

We chose to put in this one open question so we could quickly and easily gain an insight to the respondees initial response to hearing the track for the first time.  It made the responses more real and genuine and therefore helped us understand the track slightly better.


Overall, I definitely found this audience research survey a worthwhile task as we got to discover how other people interpreted a track: even more important for us because the song is practically unknown.  The task, therefore, helped us shape our initial ideas into something more realistic and substantial.