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Audience
The audience is perhaps the most important factor to consider when producing any media product, including music videos, as it is the audience that determines the video's success - or lack of.
There are two main parts to consider when focusing in on an audience to target: the demographics and the psychographics.
Demographics- basic information: age range, gender, occupation, income, married/single, living situation, etc.
Psychographics- what the interests/personality of the targeted audience are. ie. risk takers, conservative(don't take risks) trend setters, trend followers. What their image is and how it fits in with the product - the music video.

Audience Theory
In recent years a selection of theories have been devised in order to assist the media in understanding how the media itself works, so that producers can use the findings to their advantage, to unltimately dominate the media.

Hypodermic Needle Theory: this theory infers that the media is like a drug (ie needle). The audience are passive receptors - they do not think about what they're told, they just accept it. An example is in fact Adolf Hitler; he used the German media to influence his public against the Jewish. The audience take on the ideology of the media text - mass media, revealing that the media does in fact have significant power in influencing their chosen targeted audience.

Two step theory: the idea that media influences 'group leaders' or influential people within a given community is what the two step theory revolves around. In short; the media only influences certain people, which then "mexican waves" through to the rest of the public.

Uses and gratifications theory: this theory implies that the audience pick and choose which media texts they engage with. The audience have control and power; they have an 'active role' in making decisions based on their own psychographic profiles.

Effects debate: the Effects idea suggests that the media has a direct impact on the thoughts and behaviour/actions of the audience, for example when young children/adolescents have in the past watched horror films then attempted to imitate what they'd seen in reality. However, with no research having been undertaken, there is not evidence to develop the Effects debate, from a debate into a theory.

Encoding and decoding: this is also more of a debate than a theory. When a producer of a text uses codes to convey certain meanings but the audience decode them with a more oppositional reading, or with individual interpretations, who has more power? Who has more control - the media or the audience?

Reception theory: this theory opposes the Hypodermic Needle Theory. It believes that the audience is in fact actively involved, similarly to the Uses and Gratifications Theory, though it also insinuates that the audience constructs the meaning of the text. They ultimately create the meaning through the process of decoding - postmodernism.

Theorist: Roland Barthes: in his essay: The Death of the Author, supports the Reception Theory. He writes that the author does not control the meaning of the text; the audience does, and they can decode aspects in unintended and even oppositional ways.