To what extent does a pop star's image influence their audience?

In order for a pop star to be iconic and recognisable by millions, they need to become unique by developing a star motif. A star motif is an individual having a signature such as a specific dress sense, performance or even the way they present their work (such as specific font on their albums). This is known as brand awareness and the more the artist does this, the more the audience will familiarise themselves with the same pattern and catch on which makes the audience engage with the artist, resulting in them buying their songs. Many artists have star motifs such as Michael Jackson with his moonwalk, Tool with their unseen mystery and even Lady gaga with her unique and diverse dress sense.

 

In terms of music videos, abstractness is ideal if the video wants to be successful and well known since a lot of people will have different views about it and therefore will watch it again and again which also promotes the artist and their song. An example of this is ‘Sober’ by Tool which is a perfect example of abstractness; the music video has no correlation to the lyrics and therefore uses a disjunction technique. The video is quite disturbing and is animated which makes the music video diverse and allows viewers to watch to determine their own view of the subject. However, other music videos allow star motifs to develop further and influence the audience to watch their music videos since they expect the same behaviour to be shown such as Bruno Mars’ constant dress sense of sunglasses and a fedora hat.

 

Andrew Goodwin believed that every music video needed an element of star image to attract the audience. Artists lip sync when filming their music video but this creates realism for the viewers since they believe that the artist are really singing the song and therefore influences them to think of the artist as a character rather than a normal singer. Every artist is classified as a character since the artist who is on stage is a completely different person to the same artist who is at home, they use star image to make the audience believe that they are the same character they see on stage as they are at home.