Audience Theories

Uses and Gratification Theory

• This theory suggests that the audience is active and choose the media that they consume
• The theory focuses on the consumer/audience
• It says that the choice of media is influenced by: Identify, Educate, Entertain, and Social interaction.

An example of this is when someone is choosing music to listen to, they choose it so that it matches their mood.

Hypodermic Needle Theory

• This theory suggest that the audience is passive and don’t have a choice with the media that they consume
• It believes that the media inject people with it
• Mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by injecting them with the desired message to gain their wanted response
• This theory highlights the danger of media as it can easily communicate ideas to the powerless audience/consumer.

Two- Step Flow Media Theory

• Media doesn’t directly inject society, rather it injects an opinion leader who passes it on
• opinion leader’s spreads the message across society to all those who look up to them and so save media the job of spreading it.

The theory that relates to us with our music video is the uses and gratification theory. This is because our video will be made for entertainment purposes. There will not any hidden message to inject into our viewers, not would we have an opinion leader advertising our video, and so the hypodermic needle theory and the two-step flow theory will not apply to us.