Audience
Media Studies: Eduqas GCSE, topic 5.2.5
Audience
Lizzo’s primary target audience is females aged 18-24.
Audience reach
- Lizzo reaches her audience in two ways:
- Focusing on body positivity in her work.
- Using social media.
- Lizzo is incredibly personal in her social media use.
- This is unlike Bruno Mars who gets his content professionally authored.
Relatability
- Lizzo makes live recordings of her views on topics.
- For example, Lizzo expresses her thoughts on politics.
- The live recordings make Lizzo appear down to earth and relatable to her target audience.
- Lizzo has accumulated 25.3 million followers on Tiktok and has accumulated over 1 billion likes.
Reception theory
- Hall's reception theory suggests media texts contain messages that are encoded by producers and decoded by audiences.
- The preferred reading in the 'Good as Hell' music video is one of female empowerment.
- Lizzo's messages of female empowerment are accepted and enacted by the audience.
Oppositional readings
- Oppositional reading is when the audience rejects a preferred reading.
- The audience creates their own meaning for the text.
- Oppositional readings of the 'Good as Hell' music video might suggest the brand deals make the sentiment hollow.
- The video might not represent a large enough range of views about female empowerment.
Test yourself on Audience
What age group represents Lizzo's primary audience?
What TWO ways does Lizzo use to reach her audience?