Market Research
When planning on launching a new media product it is important to understand the market you are about to enter, this is why it's important to conduct Market Research. It provides important information to identify and analyze the market need, size and competition.
Market research is essentially used to find the needed 'gap in the market', which means providing an area with something which is needed and not a lot of. If there is a gap in the market, it means its more likely for that product to succeed, because there's less competitors to work against. For example if an area already has a lot of music magazines on offer to them which are popular, making another music magazine would mean it would be harder to get a large audience, as there is already so many on offer to them already.
Also, market research would help find out what is or isn't popular in a certain area. So if you found that a certain genre of music is very popular within a certain area, but there wasn't many radio stations which surrounded that genre of music, it would be a good idea to create a radio show that focused on that specific genre because there is a high chance it would be popular, as there isn't any in that area and that genre is very popular.
Market research is very important to the media because if someone is releasing a new media product without first conducting market research, they could be entering an area which is already full of other similar media products, which would mean it is more likely for that product to fail, because there was no gap in the market for another.