Evaluation - Report

Our radio demos Pulse FM and Wise FM were created by myself and Clare Wapshare, Pulse FM was designed to be a contemporary hit radio station located in the south coast of england.  We targeted it at young adults from the age of sixteen. The station aims, even though it is a breakfast show, to make the listeners feel informed, Chilled out, Comforted and alive. The target audience was chosen because it is one of the largest age brackets that listens to the radio in todays society. We described our target listener as  creative, likes to keep up-to-date with the latest chart music, they like being very social and most likely are still to be in education (weather that is school, college or university.). In there lives music would be one of there big things, a soundtrack to there day.


Through out making our demos we tried to make sure that every detail fitted to the style of the station and to our  target audience. The jingle was the first thing we decided to create as this is how the audience remembers us, we started by getting a track from a band that we knew the audience would be interested in. We chose Lies by McFly and then using audacity blended it in with a heartbeat: they were then sped up in a sense of waking the audience up on this early morning breakfast show. This then gave us a theme to follow when it came to things such as the logo,  keeping it to a red and black colour scheme fitting in with the style the audience may have. Our questionnaire showed split feelings on the jingle and the logo; some people saying that they had nothing to do with the style of the station and that it did not relate to the name of the station to others saying that they looked and sounded very professional and creative.


This then leads on to the playlist; when planning the music for our CHR  we had a look at the BBC Radio One Top 40 chart list to get a idea on what we should play seeing as our target audience like the utmost latest music. We ended up picking the following songs as our playlist as they fitted the up-beatness of the station and were in the top position on that charts at the time.

• Turn Up The Music : Chris Brown
• Part of Me : Katy Perry
• Bright Lights (Good Life) : Tinchy Stryder ft. Pixie Lott

This is this weeks playlist as you can see still very similar to what we chose.

When it comes to the audience research segment when we were giving our presentation we found that the group was split on things such as our music choices. Some members of the class commented on its suitability through its connection to the charts; at the fact that it works with what the audience would be looking for, and they said that they would listen to all the time or occasionally. However, some members said “the music is too mainstream”. Some of the comments made do seam completely unfair and out of the blue such as: "the logo/jingle have nothing to do with the station" When you can clearly see that they do, there is a pules line in the logo and a heartbeat in the jingle, as the station is called pulse FM. There were also comments to do with the music being to main stream. The station is a CHR one that we aimed to be similar to capital FM and it is stated in what our target audience wants and one them is main stream music.

All though i agree with some of the improvements, some of it seamed biased and this could of been because of a problem that has been going on with said individuals for a while and they don't seam to have a good opinion to anything that me and the other member in my group do.

With weather it fits to the conventions of radio and in particular the formats CHR and Gold I think that they do when we created our demos we decided to stay to the forms for radio rather than trying to change or challenge them, creating our demos to fit into the radio stations you hear today but just be that slight bit different but not enough to challenge the conventions of radio.

When it comes to our target audience and weather our demos are appropriate and fits with the wants and needs for them I think we have done quite well. I don’t think any of our topics we have chosen to use would be inappropriate to our audience and the music we have picked would fit in well with our target audience’s life style.

Compared to our original plans I don’t think a lot has changed to our actual plans seeing as even though the dynamics of the group has changed and we have had to take on more work between two of us, we have still stuck to the original ideas as to how we want the demos to be like.   


Over all I am very happy with how our demos turned out the fact that I have never created anything audio based means that I have learned a lot from this. When it comes to the strengths and weaknesses of myself on this assignment I think there is an equal amount of both, when it comes to my strengths they would be things such as; My logo I think that I presented it well and represented the radio station to how we wanted, I also made the playlist for Pulse FM I think the music relates to the target audience well. Another strong point I think was using audacity and starting to learn to edit. On the other hand some of my weaknesses would be things such as my communication skills when recording the vocal I think I could have spoken more clearly and to more of a steady pace but I know all this just comes with practice. Another weakness was some part of the editing as I found some parts more difficult than others.