Kate Bush's Genre & Audience

Kate Bush's overall genre is quite difficult to pinpoint, as she incorporates a lot of different styles into her music. Therefore it is quite hard to sum all the genres together into one style. However, she is very often often labelled as having elements of pop-rock, art rock, college rock, indie rock, and alternative pop/rock, experimental rock, new romantic.

Interestingly, the iTunes store, labels her music as pop.

Screenshot taken from iTunes store search.

http://991.com/NewGallery/Kate-Bush-Wuthering-Heights-2701.jpg < image reference at this link.

Kate Bush's first breakthrough single, was of course 'Wuthering heights'. At the time of its popularity, which was in 1979, the most popular chart songs included such genres as pop, disco, reggae, rock and the newly developing genre, which was electronic.

http://www.uk-charts.top-source.info/top-100-1978.shtml <Screenshot taken from this reference link.

According to the website screenshot above, these were some of the most popular songs in the year that 'Wuthering heights' was released, was was 1978.

Kate's audience and fanbase are both huge. Her recent comeback tour of live concerts in London led to tickets selling out in a very short space of time.

http://www.entertainmentwise.com/news/144936/Kate-Bush-Overwhelmed-After-Tickets-For-London-Tour-Sell-Out-In-15-Minutes

This sell out shows that she still has a huge audience, and is still a big player in the British music scene, she even at one point re-entered the charts once more, as her London shows approached.

http://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/11-kate-bush-albums-set-to-enter-official-albums-chart-top-100-ahead-first-live-shows-35-years-3075/

Despite her success in the UK, she hasn't had the same success in the USA. This means that a large part of her primary market is Europe, particularly in the UK as it is her country of origin.

I think that it would be beneficial to look at the market, and contemporary style of artwork in Europe, so that I can adapt my illustration to match its mainly European audience.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/08/16/139579900/another-american-looks-at-why-americans-dont-care-for-kate-bush < image reference at this link.

http://www.katebushnews.com/index.php/2011/07/happy-birthday-kate-bush-five-reasons-why-she-isnt-bigger-in-america/ < image reference at this link.

Thomas.