Jimmy Eat World - live performance - audience analysis

Last night I went to see alternative/indie-rock band 'Jimmy Eat World' at the O2 Brixton Academy, I thought I would do an analysis of their performance. Seeing as my genre for our music video is indie-pop which a sub-genre from alternative/indie-rock, I thought this would be useful to blog about. Being a person that is not really into this music and from looking at their performance from an outside perspective, I really enjoyed my experience.

The band performed all their songs live and included the crowd in also, breaking the fourth wall which tends to be a natural thing at a concert. They definately made the stage their own which i think is an important thing when it comes to the selling and marketing of the band and audience.

I noticed that they were selling merch at their concert which included Vinyls of their album, signed CD's and t-shirts. By selling this merch at the consert, they are widening their target audience in the online media today.

(The video footage is my own, excuse the screaming!)

 

Overall, seeing them live has helped give me an insight to the type of performance techniques they used such as  using their instruments to get the crowd going and this is a common feature used in performance based music videos. The usage of lighting was very important in creating the right atmostphere. For instance when they played their more ballad style song such as 'Hear You Hear Me' they a more gentle feel which was echoed in the lighting. It was soft colours such as a deep purple and pink with a smoke machine whch made it look like they were singin on clouds. This was really relevent to the song as the lyrics consist of "may angels lead you in" and abviously angels connotate with the clouds and skies. For their more upbeat song such as 'Sweetness' there were more greens blues and yellows. They also used flood lights that shined into the audience almost including them in the song as the lyrics read "If you listening whoaaaa, sing it back whoaaaa". The lighting is encouraging them to sing it back to them. So from looking at the lighting at the concert, it just goes to show that the right lighting can create the right atmostphere, and so much thought and effort has gone into doing all these small things that most people don't notice.

 

Seeing as ive never heard them before, taking in the type of audience they were and the location of it, I could tell that it wasnt going to be some next boy-band One Direction type music! Delving further into audience research this type of genre definately had a certain sort of image that their followers portrayed. Thie included slighty grungy and rock clothing. The audience was mostly aged from 18 upwards and mostly the audience consisted of the male gender. Following up on this, the crowd also consisted of mosh-pits which I was unfortunate enough to get stuck in, which was mostly males.

In conclusion I really enjoyed myself last night at the concert bearing in mind that this was my first time hearing them play live. I thought that they performed well and it has helped me see that performance is so important and vital in a music video so they can make that connection with their audience, therefore selling/marketing themselves further.