Rihanna targetting her audience? Or vise-versa?

Rihanna's wide audience includes young girls, just under the teenage years. But i have been wondering? Is she targeting her audience with her music and images on purpose to target an audience or are her audience going after her by listening to her music and watching her image?


Does she purposely try to target such a young audience? Is it really her fault that a young audience looks up to her? Why doesn't she change her image to be more appropriate for children?

Her videos portray her as somebody who is involved with gangs, sexually aware and arrogant - however - in contrast she reveals herself in the same videos as strong, independent, talented and fun.

With Rihanna being from an Barbados background, she has a wide ethnic following. She has opening shared her experiences of bullying at school for the lightness of her skin, which audiences could relate to.

But i cant work out whether Rihanna really wants to target an audience of younger children. The photo below shows Rihanna having a photo taken with young children, but to the amazement of the papers, she was wearing an explicit necklace. which definitely wasn't aimed at the children.

However, another side of the argument could be that Rihanna rebels against the media as she is seen as just an object - something which makes music. People may forget that she has a personality and a personal life when all they see is her in magazines and music videos.

Or maybe she wasn't expecting to be greeted by young children on the night this photo was taken?

Rihanna’s target audience profile

View more presentations from Maro Lafif

This is a small slide show which i found on the internet. I don't know who made it, but there are a few interesting points and arguments on it about the profile of Rihanna and her public image.

In conclusion, Rihanna does have a wide audience of male and females, young teenagers to 20s. However, she may not have intended her audience to be this young. She must know that she does have a young following but she doesn't do anything in her work life to change to be more suitable for them. But why should she want to change what she is doing? She hasn't lost much audience, she has probably gained more audience by being ore provocative. If she isn't losing out and is still gaining more of an audience, she wouldn't want to change it. We also mustn'tt forget the pressure she gets from her management etc.