Music Magazine Evaluation

By Daniel Jay

1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

How I used conventions and forms of a real media product.

I believe my magazine uses the conventions of real life magazine such as Kerrang and Q magazine with the main example such as having the magazine title at the top of the cover page and also having the main image over that title. Other conventions I used from other music magazines is things such as a consistent house style it is very important to have this because to the reader it can almost seem like you are reading a different magazine because of the different colours used but when the colours are the same along with the fonts etc. It helps represent your magazine as professional product and a very desirable one.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

2

I believe that my magazine represents the young group of people portrayed in my magazine in a good. I say in a good way because magazines and indeed other forms of media can represent the social group in different ways. For example newspapers portray young people in such a way that it makes them sound some what rebellious; but this is just a generalisation. Only a small percentage of teenagers could be described as being “rebellious”.

I believe that the main article in my magazine portrays it’s main subject as a role model for younger people although he is talking about his new tour; it gives off the impression that any young person could achieve this. Therefore young people in my magazine are presented positively. I think this is important to do because as I have already said young people are presented very negatively in the current media.

How I challenged the conventions of a real media product.

In most aspects I did not challenge the conventions of a professional media product I mainly conformed to them. But I think I did challenge one of them which was in fact the placement of the barcode; in most magazines the barcode is positioned at the bottom right. Whereas in mine I put it at the top right; this makes it significantly more noticeable and doesn’t cover up any of the main picture. Which I believe is good because then the viewer can fully focus on the image and become more involved with the magazine. You can see the location of the barcode below:

As you can see to the right just above my main subjects head lies the barcode, data and issue number I think this is a good place because it is clearly visible for the customer to see what issue is etc, etc.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

3

I think that the type of media institution that my would have to be one for which has a very similar genre to my magazine which is of course rock. The company which publishes this magazine is called Bauer Consumer Media. This group specialises in magazine, TV, radio stations and online. So judging that the BCM control 4 different sorts of media and own a number of music magazines including Kerrang it seems like the perfect media institution to distribute my magazine; if it were to go into production.

Other reasons why I think they would be a good media institution to distribute my product because they are big company and in 2008 had a turnover of 2.08 billion euros (1.8 billion pounds)

I have also considered online distribution, this is where the same data that would be in the hard copy is posted onto a website; not only is this better for the environment because you would save a lot of paper but also a lot more convenient for the consumer because it is more accessible. This is important because if for some reason the customer cannot get to the retailer; they can easily go online and get up the webpage containing the data.

Although I think that my magazine would cope well online, some of the customers who like the idea of reading their magazine online; may not be able to because they may not own a computer and this is of course a necessity. I would also think about charging for the use of viewing my magazine online e.g. The Times. For example they charge £6.00 per week; so I would probably do a similar pricing strategy to this.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

4

The audience of my media product will be young adults and late teens; the reasons why I think this will be the audience for my magazine is because the language and the text format I have used isn’t intended for the younger audiences and the images located in the magazine tend to be more angled towards the audience I have already stated. This is because the images take a very big impact upon the viewer especially on the front cover where my subject is standing up looking straight out of the front of the magazine to make it become more interesting. And being an older person you are more able to understand the images shown in my product.

How did you attract/address your audience?

5

I think the main way in which I attracted my audience effectively was by using a large title in the top left corner of the page as you can see in the image below the title is a very dark black on a very light background. I picked these colours because the background shows up the masthead well; by making it look bold and of course eye- catching.

Another way in which I think I attracted my audience creatively was by having a consistent colour scheme throughout the whole magazine this is good because it is used in professional magazines all the time and makes it easy to flow through the magazine.

I think the main way in which I attracted my audience effectively was by using a large title in the top left corner of the page as you can see in the image below the title is a very dark black on a very light background. I picked these colours because the background shows up the masthead well; by making it look bold and of course eye- catching.

Also the images that I have used throughout the magazine are very impacting especially the one on the front page of the magazine; which has its own aim to specifically impact the eyes of the people who may wish to purchase my magazine. If say you compared my image (which is below) with one which is smaller and less impacting; you would more likely choose the one with the bigger image.

Audience Feedback

I presented my magazine to 14 people, 7 of which were male and the other 7 were female. I asked the people numerous questions which had the objective to bring out every aspect of my magazine.

Questions like; - Was the colour scheme used appropriate for the genre of my magazine?, the majority thought that colour scheme went hand in hand with the genre.- If the magazine went into publish, would you consider buying it? And

thankfully the majority did say yes they would buy it, for various reasons. - I also included a very important question about improvements I could

make to my magazine; the overall response to this was good but every one picked up on the fact that I needed more images on my contents page.

- Also many of the people thought that my main artist was shown very well, by the amount of images relating to him.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

6

I have done a lot of planning and research throughout this entire project; for example I have chosen fonts and mastheads, colour schemes, mock up pages and much more. I think I have improved massively from researching about the magazine industry. Having the background knowledge of well known magazines; I could then implement this into my creation and have a similar magazine that could compare with Q magazine and of course the magazine I am basing mine on; Kerrang. Learning about new software to apply to my magazine was very important. For example I used fireworks very heavily to edit and manipulate images that I had taken; it was important to do this to maximise the “wow” factor of the images e.g. some of the images didn’t have a suitable background and this had to be taken out and the only way to do this was to edit it.

Using some of the advanced techniques on publisher also helped me to create a professional looking magazine, for example using some of the image borders gave a very good effect of boldness. Also the use of shadows also aided the professionalism of the magazine.

As you can see in the image on the right I have used a curved black line around the image I had taken. The reason why I did this is because it makes the image stand out towards the customer of my magazine.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

7

I think I have learnt a rather a lot since the preliminary task for example simply the look of the magazine is very different from how I would have done before. I have had to come to terms with how to correctly place images on each of the pages of my music magazine product.

Other things that I have learnt from doing the preliminary task is that I should try not to show so much blank space because this can make the magazine seem un desirable and some what boring. This is because people who purchase magazines look for things that include a lot of information on different things.