Evaluation

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

My Music Magazine was very much based on DJ magazine; I think it really stands up to established music magazines such as DJ. I think the contents page is the strongest part of the magazine that I produced and is on a par with professional magazines. I did a lot of research into contents pages of music magazines and I feel that I successfully portrayed the basic layout of a music magazine contents page.
I think my double page spread is strong but not as good as some you see in certified magazines. Although my masthead is plain and simple I think it suits the front cover, it is bold and stands out like a masthead needs to do. I think if my magazine were a genuine published music magazine then the masthead would be easily recognisable, and may even stand out more than other music magazines in shops and it defiantly appeals to my target audience. I used a simple colour palette of black, blue, purple and green which has added to the effect of my front cover being simple but at the same time exceptionally eye-catching. On my double page spread I have used a big bold headline to attract the reader when they’re flicking through the pages also for the first page of double page spread I decided to use a full page image as I have seen this done in a few magazines, though it is not that common. I feel that this makes my magazine stand out, and on the second page of the double page spread the layout is under a question, answer layout making light reading for the target audience. I really liked this image as it shows the rebellious side of some of the people in the music industry.

2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Normally the lead image on the front cover will have the artist/artists maintaining eye contact with the reader I did not do this because I expect to capture the customers attention if you do something a little bit different to every other magazine.
Though I wanted to stick to the traditional conventions, after taking this photo I thought it suited my front cover well and it didn’t matter that the artist didn’t have eye contact, and so I worked this into trying to make my magazine a little bit different. I wanted a full length shot of the artist in a gig-type shoot.
I shot the photo at a gig and played around with the brightness of the image. I wanted the artist to be pictured as he would in a gig so the image would portray them accurately. By using this image of the front cover of my music magazine I wanted to portray a true picture of what the artist is like; serious and very hard working. The particular music genre that I have chosen and have researched in depth has a large audience who are seemingly ‘up for anything’ this means that whenever they can they will go out clubbing, it seems to be a reckless audience in terms of culture as seen by my double page spread DJ Tanya sipping on some Gordon’s Dry Gin.

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

Throughout the production of my music magazine I got a lot of inspiration from DJ. One of the biggest publishes in the UK is IPC, who publish DJ. IPC media is a leading UK consumer magazine publisher. IPC is owned by Time inc., the publishing division of Time Warner Inc. The business is spilt into five distinct publishing divisions: IPC connect, IPC inspire, IPC ignite, IPC Southbank and IPC TX. Alongside these is Marketforce, the UK’s leading magazine distribution business. IPC is one of the biggest magazine publishers in the UK and publishes DJ. Because my music magazine is very similar to the DJ I would choose IPC to publish it.

4) Who would be the audience for your product?

The audience that would be most interested in the magazine I have created will be 16-20 year olds, the music that my magazine is summarising and evaluating is listened to by most youths in that category, its where the lector genre gain most of their money, from club-goers in particular who are primarily in this group.

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

I made it clear that the magazine that I was creating was an Electro magazine, it addressed information that had never been seen before so introducing stories as exclusive makes the audience feel like they are some of the first to know, I also attracted the audience by introducing a prize that you could only win by buying the magazine, putting this on the front cover and making the prize something that an electro lover would want to go to.

6) What has been the feedback from your audience?

This product was well received by its target market (16-20 year olds) but it has faced a lot of criticism from older generations, but this has created an adverse reaction in the target audience, the more the older generations don’t like the product the more teenagers like it. This has been very good for the publicity of the magazine.

7) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of construction?

I personally have learnt a lot about the technologies that I used to construct the media coursework, especially the program Microsoft image suite 2006, I used this throughout my whole coursework and learnt a lot about it, also I created a blog on the internet which was a valuable exercise because it is actually very useful to know how to do this because you can put information that you may need at a later date into the blog and go back to that blog from anywhere in the world.

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

I have learnt that it is better to have a quality feel to the magazine rather than filling it with useless information, I have also learnt that it is not hard to make something look how you want it to, manipulating photos is a very easy process and it is easy to make it look real too. Also if a picture comes out a different way to what you wanted it also means that you don’t have to just take another picture you can change it to look like something completely different