Q1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media?

My music magazine House is based on House, dubstep, drum and bass and electro pop music, targeted at teenagers aged 16 to young adults 26 years old . The main aim of my music magazine was to focus on the specific age group and make sure my magazine attracts their attention. In order to achieve this I focused on the presentation of magazine, finding an appropriate layout for a music magazine of my genre was very difficult as most household magazines published are either rock, rap, pop or r&b, therefore the conventions for a typical music magazine would need to e challenged and developed in order to differ to other magazines.

To compare my music magazine to another magazine similar to my genre, I used mix mag October 2009 edition. The masthead of my magazine is on the left hand side of the magazine in order to make it more visible to the customers when stacked in news agents and super markets, I decided to use this convention – which is common in many magazines ( i.e. Q magazine) because it makes it more recognizable to the audience  as they will be able to see most of the Masthead due to the way they stack news papers. Also from my market research I found out that people didn’t like a front cover to compact especially with text instead preferring eye catching colours and photographs. Therefore in order to create space having the mastehead on the left would enable me to have more space to spread other important information i.e selling lines and the date. Compared to  mix mag where the masthead spreads across the top of the page which make s it hard for the customers and difficult to add the required details without making the magazine seem to compact , therefore restricting the flexibility of the presentation of the magazine.

I challenged the conventions of the music magazine by the positioning my main cover line in the center on top of the photograph instead of the left (like mix mag) or the right hand side of the front cover. I did this again because not only does it create space but it also balances out the magazine preventing it from becoming one sided. By placing thing the main cover line in the center it again enables more space and prevents crowdedness without making the magazine look unfinished or incomplete. Also placing it again prevents crowdedness by balancing the front cover. As you can see there are 3 cover lines – two on the left and one on the right, my me placing it in the center it prevents me from adding an extra cover line to the opposing side of the cover line to balance it out, therefore  creating crowdedness. However the draw back of doing this is that the readers would clearly be able to read the main cover head as the photo may detract the attention away from the main cover line.

For the photo I developed the convention, instead of using a  medium close up like mix mag, I used a mid shot photograph so the audience are able to clearly see what the artist in the magazine is wearing. Because my magazine is aimed at the club scene and dance music I felt that it was essential that the audience saw what the artist is wearing because she is meant to represent that scene so by showing her flashy and sparkly clothes it initially show the readers what type of genre it is and who that magazine is aimed for. The reason why the mixed magazine photo worked is also because of the exposure of what the artist looks like and is wearing, the make up and the jewellery symbolizes this and therefore I wanted to imitate this.