Research: Pop Rock As A Genre

‘Pop rock’ will come under the genre 'alternative'. We are deciding to focus on this genre and try and get it to gain popularity as a genre of its own. To do so, we will attract the audience by incorporating aspects of pop, as that is the third most popular genre. As you can see from the chart, that even though pop/ alternative had decreased in sales between the years 2006 to 2007, it was still the third most heavily selling genre of music in the industry itself. This data gives us more confidence when trying to market this specific genre. From this table you can see that Alternative/pop rock is the third best selling genre of the years 2006/2007. From this, as a media organisation we can invest in this genre as the genre is already a secure one in the music industry. It's a worthy risk to take, as the genre has already proven to be popular and has sold well in the past.

I am researching into as much demographic data as i can to see how the sales of the genre Pop/Rock has decreased or increased over the past 10 years or so. The reason for researching into the demographic data is so we can envisage as a group how well the genre of music we are trying to market is going to sell.

This next table lists the 10 most popular genres taken from the online survey at the website 'eternaltreasures.com/ top10mostpopularmsuicgenresbasedonsalesofsinglesalbumsandmusicvideos'. As aforementioned we as a group are looking for a music artist in the genre of pop/rock. We will be confident after seeing this table as both 'pop' and 'rock' are in the top ten in the top ten most popular genres. This survey was taken in 2008 which shows that for 3 years running pop/rock was in the top three best selling genres in the music industry. This table, like the last will increase our interest to invest in the genre as the potential for success is very high in comparison to other poorer selling genres.

This table is taken from the results of an online poll. Again, pop-rock isn’t specified as a genre, so it would come under ‘other’ which is the most preferred music genre from this sample of people. As you can see other( pop/rock) is in a table with many other established genres of the music industry, yet as part of the percentage 'other' you can see it is in the highest percentage out of them all. As a group trying to market pop/genre therefore it is excellent to see how popular these tables are showing pop/rock to be, as it means an investment into a band or group in that genre will be a calculated risk, with the likelihood of success being good odds in comparison to other genres.

The next screen shot is a table that shows the number of fans for a variety of genres of music on the most popular social network site, Facebook. It shows how popular each genre is and how much the difference in number of fans have changed in the past 6 months. Pop rock is within top ten, at number 4 in a table which consists of over 50 genres. Firstly in a marketing sense this table is positive as it shows how pop/rock is an established genre in the music industry, so if invested in, the likelihood of success is higher than 45 other genres. Secondly you can see that in the last 6 months the percentage of fans of pop/rock has rose the least, which investing wise gives an incentive to revamp pop/rock by positively marketing an artist in that genre. It gives an incentive to invest as it is still the fourth most popular genre and hasn't been doing well, but with a decent marketing strategy, may be able to rise into the top three or more again. From further analysis of the table we can see that reggae has rose the most in popularity over the last 6 months. As a marketing ploy therefore we maybe could look to add elements of the reggae genre into a pop/rock music video of an artist we are studying to see whether it heightens the percentage of popularity in pop/rock.

Written by Sid.