R+P Post 4: Audience groups of interest

UK Market:

souce: singles

source: albums

The UK market's music taste is constantly fluctuating. Therefore the best way to understand it, such as finding what's popular or analyse if there are any gaps in the market that my group and I can compensate for, would be to analyse the current best selling UK singles and albums charts. 

The album chart shows a lean towards male artists, with only two female artists hitting the top ten. On the singles chart gender bias is more balanced, however there is heavy genre bias with all of the songs in the top 10 being of pop or dance (either deep house, electronic or club) genre. On the albums chart it shows a similar distribution with a genre bias. However instead of it being towards dance or pop genre, it is a close competition with heavy metal/rock and pop music. This kind of trend is reinforced in the graph below which I found from a 'Statista' article online.

source: statista.com

Youths:

source: noisey.vice,com

From the teenage testimonials about their music consumption that I found online and the interview video I conducted amongst my friends, I found that youths, ranging from the ages 13-25, tend to have a very varied music taste and all admitted to listening to mainstream chart music amid their niche music tastes. This idea of mainstream music impacting youths greatly is illustrated by a Ajay Kalia's full blog post on his study on people's listening habits, which you can find an insert of below.

Music consumption
Questionnaire of some
of my friends 

However when asked the question "do you enjoy listening to mainstream music?" their answers became very interesting, especially one by Najid R. where he stated "when I'm by myself, say listening to the radio, I don't really enjoy chart music as much as I like listening to grime but when listening to the same chart songs I end up enjoying them more and finding them really catchy" . This leads me to believe that there is a certain companionship gratification that pop music provides that other genres do not- and maybe that's why in the UK, it is one of the top two in album sales.