Monday, 28 March 2011
Who would be the audience for your media product?
As I am combining two types of genres, the audience wouldn't be like a typical audience for other magazines like NME and Kerrang, where the audience is very seperate and labelled.
An emo audience An indie audience
Above are the stereotypical people that you would expect to read particular magazines, like Kerrang (a hard rock music magazine) and NME (an indie magazine), I wouldn’t want to label my audience as much as I believe this can put a person off buying the magazine; for example people who like some of the bands featured in NME may feel intimidated when purchasing the magazine as many people believe you have to be of the indie stereotype, rolled up trousers and ray bans. I want to move away from this and make people feel comfortable buying the magazine despite what they look like. I want my magazine to be based around the music more than the type of audience, I believe that by doing this I can create a wider audience appeal as well as I am not restricting the magazine to a certain genre.
An emo audience An indie audience
Above are the stereotypical people that you would expect to read particular magazines, like Kerrang (a hard rock music magazine) and NME (an indie magazine), I wouldn’t want to label my audience as much as I believe this can put a person off buying the magazine; for example people who like some of the bands featured in NME may feel intimidated when purchasing the magazine as many people believe you have to be of the indie stereotype, rolled up trousers and ray bans. I want to move away from this and make people feel comfortable buying the magazine despite what they look like. I want my magazine to be based around the music more than the type of audience, I believe that by doing this I can create a wider audience appeal as well as I am not restricting the magazine to a certain genre.
Combining mainstream and indie would be a whole new concept in the music magazine world as at the moment there are only set, labelled genres, not mixed ones. This leaves a massive audience unattended to and means I could really benefit from combining these; I would have to be careful which bands are mentioned on the front cover as well appealing visually to both genres. Mainstream indie, in clothes terms, would mean Topshop and H&M rather than these exclusive one off makes by top designers; I want people to feel they can relate to the bands and the real world, this would again widen my audience.
Ideally my audience would people who have an interest in music and love listening to new stuff and have an open mind, as well as being open to the idea of this music being on the radio and being well known to a lot of the world. I think magazines like NME and Indie really restrict themselves in this way as they bring across this message that the second a song goes on a mainstream radio station, like Radio One, then the music’s to mainstream now as it’s been released to the rest of the population. However I think that by advertising the music on the radio, it’s making the world realised that these bands are really good, and I want my audience to be open to that idea; be less protective of the bands.
Monday, 21 March 2011
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
IPC
- IPC is the biggest magazine consumer and was founded in 1963 and is owned by Times Inc
- Focuses on the distribution of magazines and currently distributes the music most dominating magazine, NME
- They currently sell over 350million different magazines a year and is bought by almost 26million adults each year
- They have a diverse range of different magazines ranging from music, TV, homes, boats, gardening and fashion
- IPC is further split into six different categories which include...
IPC Magazines, publishing the consumer magazines and comics.
IPC Trade and Technical, publishing the specialist magazines (later known as IPC Business Press Ltd).
IPC Books, handling all book publishing (headed by Paul Hamlyn, whose own company had been acquired by IPC).
IPC Printing, handling all non-newspaper printing operations (headed by Arnold Quick, whose own company had also been acquired by IPC).
IPC New Products, a launching pad for products which used new technology (headed by Alistair McIntosh).
- NME has now become the longest running and most well respected music magazine in the industry and has a circulation of 33, 875
- The magazine was first was published in 1952 and has been released weekly since then with a wide audience of both males and females
Fusion
- Because IPC's impressive background and portfolio, I would ideally like them to distribute my magazine weekly
- Another perk of having IPC distribute my magazine would be their online audience, with over 14million online users, this would create more publicity for the magazine and would boost overall sales
- IPC has a very impressive portfolio and distributes over 60 magazines with a wide variety, I think it would benefit the company to have another music magazine who are from the same type of genre as the wide selling NME. This way they have a guaranteed audience set up
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
I wanted to create a different type of genre for my magazine, instead of a specific one like NME, the indie genre, and Kerrang, the rock genre, I wanted to try and include two types of genres. After researching, I found that their wasn't actually any type of magazine that focused on main stream music that you hear on the radio, however I also wanted to include more independent bands, therefore decided to create a merge of mainstream and indie to create Fusion. This idea would fill a big gap in the market as with a lot of people, you like more than one type of genre and by buying the magazine, you’re restricting yourself.
For the front cover I decided to use my friend Lydia, who would be posing as Ellie Goulding; mixing with people who also like the same sort of music as me gave guidance to help pick the bands that would best suit the magazine. Ellie Goulding is very popular at the moment and is often played on the radio, however before she reached this fame, she was very well known as an undiscovered, independent artist. This is why I picked her for my magazine, because she appeals to a lot of different types of people and this would widen my audience; however to use her, I would have to make sure she wouldn’t intimidate people away from the magazine with her clothes, hair etc. Therefore I had to be careful what types of other bands/stories were included, I had to include bands that a variety of people would have heard of, and I used this summer’s upcoming festivals to help me.
I dressed the model in simple clothes from Topshop, a mainstream shop; this was to my advantage as this could branch off into another story and be included in the double page spread on how down to Earth Ellie is. I wanted the image to look friendly and welcoming; from research I had done earlier, I found that many of the images are quite intimidating to the audience, I think if I had taken influence from that and posed her in a position like these, then my magazine wouldn’t work as well as many people would just brush it off as another indie magazine where you don’t know half the artists.
Throughout the magazine, when using pictures of “Ellie Goulding”, I kept to friendly, fun poses that reflected her as a real person, this also reflected when writing the whole article.
The contents page was essential to get right, as that included the bands who would be featured in that week’s issue; the band index helped with this, however I had to be careful what bands I picked as I was aiming for two types of audience and this could be easily lost when including too many bands that people haven’t heard of. I mixed the bands with some of the mainstream festivals happening this summer too, for example I had an exclusive on Reading and Leeds and a chance to win tickets to the sold out Isle of Wight festival, this responded to my specific genre.
I think the use of images, especially on the double page spread, was aimed more at the indie audience who would appreciate little features like an image looking like a Polaroid picture. I linked the bands to the audience and added little features, like mainstream festivals and bands, to advertise the genre of my magazine as well as making the whole article on “Ellie Goulding” a lot friendlier compared to double page spreads done by NME, the Pete Doherty article is an example of this. I wanted to show that a magazine can mix two genres and to read a magazine you don’t have to be labelled this type of person or that, I think my front cover, double page spread and contents page portrayed this really well and I was happy with the outcome.
For the front cover I decided to use my friend Lydia, who would be posing as Ellie Goulding; mixing with people who also like the same sort of music as me gave guidance to help pick the bands that would best suit the magazine. Ellie Goulding is very popular at the moment and is often played on the radio, however before she reached this fame, she was very well known as an undiscovered, independent artist. This is why I picked her for my magazine, because she appeals to a lot of different types of people and this would widen my audience; however to use her, I would have to make sure she wouldn’t intimidate people away from the magazine with her clothes, hair etc. Therefore I had to be careful what types of other bands/stories were included, I had to include bands that a variety of people would have heard of, and I used this summer’s upcoming festivals to help me.
I dressed the model in simple clothes from Topshop, a mainstream shop; this was to my advantage as this could branch off into another story and be included in the double page spread on how down to Earth Ellie is. I wanted the image to look friendly and welcoming; from research I had done earlier, I found that many of the images are quite intimidating to the audience, I think if I had taken influence from that and posed her in a position like these, then my magazine wouldn’t work as well as many people would just brush it off as another indie magazine where you don’t know half the artists.
Throughout the magazine, when using pictures of “Ellie Goulding”, I kept to friendly, fun poses that reflected her as a real person, this also reflected when writing the whole article.
The contents page was essential to get right, as that included the bands who would be featured in that week’s issue; the band index helped with this, however I had to be careful what bands I picked as I was aiming for two types of audience and this could be easily lost when including too many bands that people haven’t heard of. I mixed the bands with some of the mainstream festivals happening this summer too, for example I had an exclusive on Reading and Leeds and a chance to win tickets to the sold out Isle of Wight festival, this responded to my specific genre.
I think the use of images, especially on the double page spread, was aimed more at the indie audience who would appreciate little features like an image looking like a Polaroid picture. I linked the bands to the audience and added little features, like mainstream festivals and bands, to advertise the genre of my magazine as well as making the whole article on “Ellie Goulding” a lot friendlier compared to double page spreads done by NME, the Pete Doherty article is an example of this. I wanted to show that a magazine can mix two genres and to read a magazine you don’t have to be labelled this type of person or that, I think my front cover, double page spread and contents page portrayed this really well and I was happy with the outcome.
Monday, 14 March 2011
In what ways does your product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions
Above is the front cover of my music magazine along with an example of a magazine that helped guide me, NME.
My music magazine was based on the Independent music genre, however to make my magazine stand out I wanted to put a twist on it, to achieve this I made the genre of my magazine main stream indie; Ellie Goulding and artists like this are examples of main stream indie.
After researching NME, I decided to keep my magazine less busy and more minimal but not as minimal as other magazines I looked at, Indie is an example of this. In this I was challenging the normal media conventions, as I wanted something that had not yet been created in the magazine industry; I used a variety of fonts but separated them out so they were more evenly spaced, this made the cover look less busy and more minimal without it looking boring or over crowded.
From the research I did of NME, I found many factors of their products that I liked and decided to bring into my product; one of these factors was in the contents page, NME included a weekly alphabetically ordered list of the bands included in that current issue, I decided to bring this aspect across to my contents page as I thought it helped the reader to understand the magazine in more detail and helped them to focus in on what they were looking for.
I wanted the cover to look colourful, to grab the audiences attention, but I didn't want to over power the cover with too many colours that clashed; so I used the idea of a fixed colour pallet with colours that all worked well together. I think a lot of different magazines do this, and it helps to make each one stand out; this also helped my magazine to promote the main stories, for example the bright red font was used for the main Ellie Goulding story compared to the white font promoting Two Door Cinema Club, I think this was an effective idea as you can see NME magazine also uses this, with the main white font highlighing the Pete Doherty story.
The main picture is Ellie Goulding (Lydia was used to model) however because of the lack of equipment, I didn't have anything to use as a solid background, this made my magazine feel less proffesional as I had to use photoShop to cut the picture out and place it on a background on Adobe Illustrator. Ideally, if I did have the equipment then I wouldn't have to cut the image out on software but use the photo as it was. Howevef I did get to edit the photo on PhotoShop which meant I could make the image vibrant, and make the picture stand out.
After focusing on NME magazine, I decided to use a range of different fonts on the cover to make it more interesting and to highlight certain stories, however by using this technique, theirs a risk of over doing the cover and scaring the audience away because theirs just too much going on to focus on one thing. Therefore I kept to four different fonts that ranged depending on the type of story, for example I used a bigger, bolder font for the Ellie Goulding story when compared to a smaller, thinner font for the Reading and Leeds festival update. This is a technique influenced by NME and other less music orientated magazines, like Look.
My double page was influenced by NME in a few ways, however the point of creating a magazine was to create your own style and I tried to achieve this. The main way I achieved this was by using a specific colour of purple through out my magazine on the cover, contents page and double page spread; I used the purple to highlight specific points and titles, for example to make the band index, influenced by NME, clear I but a purple background behind every other band name with a white font. This seperated the whole block for my contents page and added a vibrance that other contents pages didnt achieve.
The magazine Kerrange incorperates a letter from the public into their contents page every week and I thought this was a really good idea to help show the audience that they have a say on what goes into the magazine; therefore I took influence from this and added my own twist on it by putting a picture of the writter next to the letter, the picture was slightly rotated to give it a vintage, worn look which I thought looked really good; I added a box around this to seperate each piece from the other.
Apart from the picutre of the audience who wrote in, I decided not to include anymore images in the contents page as I wanted to guide the audience as much as possible and keep a simple look which was fresh compared to the cover.
My double page spread was based on the Ellie Goulding story, I wanted to keep my spread simple and clearly laid out for the audience to follow; to achieve this I had to play around with where the title, image and text would go to make the text easy to follow through without getting confused like some other double page spreads. I think my double page is different to a lot of other magazines as it is a lot less busy, compared to magazines like NME and Kerrang; this made my magazine stand out and go against the "norm", challenge what everyone has to offer.
I kept to the purple colour palete with white font when the background of the font was purple, this made the questions really stand out and made it a lot easier to follow the whole story which I thought was a really good, unique idea.
To keep that vintage, worn look I framed the picture so it looked like it was taken in a polaroid camera; this was a good idea I thought as again not many other magazines had done that, and it made the picture (Ellie/Lydia) look more relaxed and like a real double page spread.
The main picture is Ellie Goulding (Lydia was used to model) however because of the lack of equipment, I didn't have anything to use as a solid background, this made my magazine feel less proffesional as I had to use photoShop to cut the picture out and place it on a background on Adobe Illustrator. Ideally, if I did have the equipment then I wouldn't have to cut the image out on software but use the photo as it was. Howevef I did get to edit the photo on PhotoShop which meant I could make the image vibrant, and make the picture stand out.
After focusing on NME magazine, I decided to use a range of different fonts on the cover to make it more interesting and to highlight certain stories, however by using this technique, theirs a risk of over doing the cover and scaring the audience away because theirs just too much going on to focus on one thing. Therefore I kept to four different fonts that ranged depending on the type of story, for example I used a bigger, bolder font for the Ellie Goulding story when compared to a smaller, thinner font for the Reading and Leeds festival update. This is a technique influenced by NME and other less music orientated magazines, like Look.
My double page was influenced by NME in a few ways, however the point of creating a magazine was to create your own style and I tried to achieve this. The main way I achieved this was by using a specific colour of purple through out my magazine on the cover, contents page and double page spread; I used the purple to highlight specific points and titles, for example to make the band index, influenced by NME, clear I but a purple background behind every other band name with a white font. This seperated the whole block for my contents page and added a vibrance that other contents pages didnt achieve.
The magazine Kerrange incorperates a letter from the public into their contents page every week and I thought this was a really good idea to help show the audience that they have a say on what goes into the magazine; therefore I took influence from this and added my own twist on it by putting a picture of the writter next to the letter, the picture was slightly rotated to give it a vintage, worn look which I thought looked really good; I added a box around this to seperate each piece from the other.
Apart from the picutre of the audience who wrote in, I decided not to include anymore images in the contents page as I wanted to guide the audience as much as possible and keep a simple look which was fresh compared to the cover.
My double page spread was based on the Ellie Goulding story, I wanted to keep my spread simple and clearly laid out for the audience to follow; to achieve this I had to play around with where the title, image and text would go to make the text easy to follow through without getting confused like some other double page spreads. I think my double page is different to a lot of other magazines as it is a lot less busy, compared to magazines like NME and Kerrang; this made my magazine stand out and go against the "norm", challenge what everyone has to offer.
I kept to the purple colour palete with white font when the background of the font was purple, this made the questions really stand out and made it a lot easier to follow the whole story which I thought was a really good, unique idea.
To keep that vintage, worn look I framed the picture so it looked like it was taken in a polaroid camera; this was a good idea I thought as again not many other magazines had done that, and it made the picture (Ellie/Lydia) look more relaxed and like a real double page spread.
Monday, 7 March 2011
Edited Double Page Spread
First draft double page spread
Contents Page Final
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