Analyse with me- Epiphanies Edition

Last weeks epiphanies for me were my light bulb moments. This week those light bulbs were replaced with even brighter LED style bulbs. So let me expand on them.

My first epiphany, surrounds my niche and their relationship to the “eras” Ariana Grande (AG) has released. All fans of AG have a specific time from AGs discography that they love. The preferred “era” has an emotional connection to the fan. For me personally, my favourite era is the Thank U, Next era. Why? Simply because the music released and promoted during this era(November 2018 – 2019 December) resonates with me. This time in my life was extremely difficult for me mentally and the music in this album also had a sense of struggle and pain to it that allowed me to connect to it. The connection music has to a fan has been linked to evoking our brains, limbic system among other parts of our brains (Pharm, 2021). In a study by Finnish scientists, the “Limbic areas of the brain, known to be associated with emotions, were found to be involved in rhythm and tonality processing”. This means that a listener our brains are processing the music and bringing up the emotions we have associated to the music from the tone and rhythm of the song. Each AG fan has their own story and their reasons to connect to each song, album or era and it’s become very interesting to learn about from observing other content creators.

“You got me all up in my feels”

Nasty (2020), Ariana Grande

TikTok is a platform with its sole purpose of showing each user new content and creators. Due to this, I’ve found it to be difficult to identify if the content I am creating is reaching my desired audience. Checking through my posts, it can be seen that I am trying to mould my content to fit within the current trends of the platform also utilising niche specific hashtags and trending hashtags to try to reach my audience as this is how the platform has been built (Abidin 2020). At this time, this has not been as successful as I had hoped. Pushing me to try to rethink my content style. TikTok is unlike other social media platforms as it does not need to have a consistent aesthetic or style for your content to go viral (Abidin 2020).

My third epiphany was about the identification of content styles and personas which have led me to the development of my persona. As I identified above, my content is not receiving the engagement I would have aspired to have had. From my analytics, I can see that I have to rework my content and persona as a potential way to reach a larger audience. The different use of music and a more emphasised use on transitions or challenges (Literat 2021) may help me reach my niche audience and the for you page on the platform better than before. This may be more beneficial than I had anticipated and is an area I hope to educate myself in to further my DA’s progress.

References

Abidin, C 2020, ‘Mapping Internet Celebrity on TikTok: Exploring Attention Economies and Visibility Labours’, Cultural Science Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 77–103, viewed 14 September 2021, <https://culturalscience.org/articles/10.5334/csci.140/print/&gt;.

Ahlgrim, C 2021, All of Ariana Grande’s albums, ranked from worst to best, Insider, Insider, viewed 14 September 2021, <https://www.insider.com/ariana-grande-albums-ranked-best-worst&gt;.

Alluri, V, Toiviainen, P, Jääskeläinen, IP, Glerean, E, Sams, M & Brattico, E 2012, ‘Large-scale brain networks emerge from dynamic processing of musical timbre, key and rhythm’, NeuroImage, vol. 59, no. 4, pp. 3677–3689, viewed 13 September 2021, <https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/science/article/pii/S1053811911013000&gt;.

ArianaGrandeVevo 2020, Ariana Grande – nasty (audio), YouTube, viewed 13 September 2021, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3BuLzTvo0o&gt;.

Literat, I 2021, ‘“Teachers Act Like We’re Robots”: TikTok as a Window Into Youth Experiences of Online Learning During COVID-19’, AERA Open, vol. 7, p. 233285842199553, viewed 14 September 2021, <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858421995537&gt;.

Pharm, J 2021, What Are the Major Functions of the Limbic System?, MedicineNet, MedicineNet, viewed 13 September 2021, <https://www.medicinenet.com/what_are_the_major_functions_of_the_limbic_system/article.htm&gt;.