music magazine evaluation

Music Magazine Evaluation

Lucy Antwiss

Demographics & Psychographics The intended audience for

my magazine was both males and females aged 15-25. The social group that I aimed my magazine at were Indie Scenesters, Alternative, Rebels and Trendies. I chose to price my magazine at £2.50 as I think that this is a reasonable price that teenagers and young adults would be able to afford. This means that my magazine would fall into the C1 and C2 categories.

Research

In order to carry out the appropriate research for my music magazine I created an online survey. I used ‘Survey Monkey’ to create this as it was an simple and efficient way to gather the information.

Using a Blog

To allow my work to be able to be easily accessed and edited I created a blog using blogger.com and posted my work onto it. This meant that if anyone wanted to view my work all that I had to do was sent them the link to my blog.

Intentions

I intended that my magazine would be different, interesting and cool so that it would appeal to my target audience. I achieved this by using a local well known band as my main feature, this would give the audience something to relate to. I wanted the magazine to stay with the indie/alternative music genre so I used a band that was of this style. I wanted to make the appearance of my magazine different so I used purple and yellow as my main colours as these are not used very much.

Preliminary Task

As a preliminary task I created a student magazine front cover and contents page plan. I done this as a practise so that I could learn and develop my skills for the final task. My target audience was teenagers aged 13 – 18 as this would be the age of high school students. It was aimed at both males and females. This helped me a lot as it gave me the chance to learn the basic skills that I would need for my final task.

Preliminary TaskFeedback

I asked my classmates their opinions on my magazine and asked how I could improve elements so that I knew what to do for my final task. Creating the plan for the contents page allowed me to see how the planning in extremely necessary for the final task.

Genre

The music genres for my magazine were indie, rock and alternative, I decided this as they were the most popular genres when I don’t the survey research. The reason that I chose this band to interview and photograph was because they fit the music genre perfectly as they are a indie, rock band with an individual and quirky sound to their music.

Conventions

I researched the conventions of other music magazines so that I knew what would be appropriate and what would work well when I created my magazine.

Photographs

When I met up with the band I took as many photos as I could as I wanted to have a wide range to choose from when creating my magazine. In total I took 194 photos of the band. I edited the best ones and then used them in my magazine. I used several different angles such as medium shots, long shots, worms eye view. Here are some of my photos.

Original Image

Edited Image

Planning the Layout

To ensure that I plan appropriately for this task I made a flat plan of the front cover, contents page and double page spread. This meant that I knew what the layout of my magazine would look like. However as I made my magazine the layouts changed a lot as I experimented with the layout.

Font and Graphics

For my masthead at first I chose a curly font however I then decided that this was not bold enough and did not stand out from the page enough. So I changed it to a font that was more striking.

First Idea

Final Idea

Mise en Sence I chose several locations for my photos

including, a ridged wall so that they could each slot in gap in the wall. I also used their rehearsal place to take photos as they were rehearsing so that I had some images of them performing. I also used a brick wall as this gave a grunge feel to the images.

Initial Ideas

I had many ideas for the name of my magazine such as:

• Strum

• Beat

• Fret

However I decide to use ‘Fuel’ as I thought that this was different as it was not directly related to music.

Publishing

If I was to publish my magazine then the company that I would most like it to be published by would be IPC as they publish many magazines such as NME which is very similar to my own.

Final Evaluation

When creating my magazine I considered aspects such as demographics and psychographics, genre, the conventions, photographs, font and graphics, mise en sence, and what publisher could publish my magazine. I have considered my audience and used images of both males and females so that my magazine would appeal to both sexes. The colour that I chose were also suitable for both males and females. I used a popular local band so that my audience would be able to relate to the content of the magazine.

What I have learnt

During this task I have learnt how to edit images, the conventions of magazines, about publishers and the industry, how to layout magazine front covers, contents pages and feature. I have gained many skills from this task and have learnt lots of things that I did not know prior to this course.