A meta-narrative is a narrative of historical meaning, experience and knowledge combining together to create one source.

Richard Dyer, a media theorist, came up with the idea of ‘Paradox of the star’. He states that star are extraordinary and talented, yet are also ordinary as they go shopping and do day to day activities. He also states that they are both present and absent. This is because of their tweets and social media being very present, yet they also perform in concerts and interviews meaning they are out of reach.

I made my meta-narrative on the website Prezi, I chose Florence and the Machine to analyse. This is because they are an Indie band which fits my topic well. I have included information about the history of the band and also their experiences.

Please click on the image above to take you to my Prezi website where you can access the information on the various segments in the picture above.

This will help me when I make my music magazine because I now know how much detail to go into with the ‘look’ my model portrays and I have realised that all aspects of the star are noticed by the reader. After this task I have come to realise that I need to include lots of information about my star, for example, the history of my star and how this can relate to the demo and psychographics of my target audience.

Next I created a moodboard of my star, this included ideas of hair, makeup, outfits and props to give me a guideline of what my star will look like and more ideas to work off. Here is my moodboard.

This moodboard will help me when it comes to my shoot as I will remember all my props, it gives me inspiration for poses and angles.

Next I created a moodboard on the website pinterest including all things I thought related to Indie pop. Ranging from clothing to makeup to colours to artists to hairstyles. I feel this will really help me get my head around the idea of branding and how important ‘looks’ are.

This moodboard really inspires me to create a similar magazine front cover and gives me an idea of what I want my model, front cover poses, colour and makeup to look like; so I believe this is very useful for me to continue to look at.

I created a googleslide where I could paste all information about the demographics and psychographics of the population that listen to my genre (Indie pop)’s music. I also included some examples pf Indie pop artists and magazine covers with them starring the front cover.

I used the website YouGov to gather all the demographics and psychographics of fans. Here is the information I managed to find.

When searching, I discovered that most listeners are millenials as this is a fairly recent, trendy genre that wasn’t popular back in the 20th century. I believe most of the fans will be female and individualists, this meaning they are very self reliant and is likely to listen to this music alone.

This will help when I develop my music magazine as its enabled me to focus on the fans’ demo & psychographics, interests and lifestyles so I can now adapt my magazine to their taste.

My next task was to create a dating profile of someone that would listen to my music and take an interest in my music magazine. I made sure they were female, based in the UK and were of millenial age, somebody that I felt I could relate to. I also selected a picture of a young girl off the internet used mini images, buttons, icons, a logo and a pink theme to portray the effect of being a dating profile. This is what I came up with!

My chosen theme is Indie Pop and the name of my music magazine is REIGN

In this lesson we came up with a name for our music magazine and put together a word cloud of things we wanted to portray throughout the magazine. I came up with the name of ‘Reign’ to be the title. I chose this name because I feel as though it suggests a very bold vibe, and also power and authority.

Here is my word cloud with the title of my magazine in bold.

My mission statement: Reign aims to be a trendy, bestselling music magazine among the pop and indie fans. It includes and provides all interesting information including this week’s top hits, interviews from your favourite artists and much more.

This is the front cover of a billboard magazine with Billie Eilish on the front cover. The target audience of this magazine will be Billie Eilish fans who tend to be aged from 13-20 so the teenage years.

The phrase ‘rebel with a plan’ portrays the message of Billie herself being a rebel. This message is also conveyed by the use of all the jewellery she is wearing and the careless look on her face. The fact that the image is in black and white also shows an edgy yet basic side to her. Billie’s favourite colour is black so this conveys her as a person well.

However the word rebel contradicts the word plan also, this is significant as she gives off a very rough look which is similar to her style of music, yet is under control and has a secretive plan.

This time we were allowed to pick our own magazine cover rather than the last task where we were allocated one. I liked this because I could choose one I was more interested in, I could analyse and annotate this magazine a lot more easily as shown in the slide above. I managed to find most of the information about target audience, price, mission statement and the audience psychographic so I included everything I could find into this poster to make it as informative as possible.

I also made the background of my slide the same colour as the ‘billboard’ masthead, this was to make the overall look of the slide more attractive and tie together well.

This week we’ve been looking at demographics psychographics and target audience. In class, we were put into pairs and given the front cover of a magazine. Mine was ‘vibe’ magazine with Kendrick Lamar on the front. We were asked to find other artists similar to Kendrick Lamar, his target audience and which gender listen to him more, the mission statement of vibe magazine and also facts on the you.gov website in order to find out his ratings and statistics etc.

Demographics are the target audiences age, gender, race and other factors including job.

Psychographics being the target audiences traits, beliefs, personality, values, and interests.

When I make my magazine, I will take all of these into account when focusing on my target audience. I will add things that I know people of that age group will want to see and include other things they may be interested in, such as I will name other music artists similar to my genre that my audience might like.

Here is our finished product after finding all our information about target audience, demographics and psychographics of this magazine and the star on the front cover.

There are 2 types of magazine, conventional and unconventional.

Conventional magazines are the bog standard magazines you see everywhere. They have all the features you’d expect a normal magazine to have. These being:

• Masthead
• Plug
• Pug
• Main cover star
• Main cover line
• Captions
• Cover lines
• Price
• Issue date
• Barcode
• Freebie

However unconventional magazines are rare and don’t include as many of/any of the features a conventional one would have. This is because they usually have little to no writing on the front cover, aren’t branded and tends to be just one big image; more like how a book would look.

In groups we annotated a conventional magazine and labelled all of its key features. Here is a picture of our work.

When it comes to making my magazine, i’m sure I will choose to create a conventional magazine as most music magazines are this, this is because it will be easier to have a masthead with my magazine name in bold, I can add headings with features of the magazine listed, insert more images and make it as eye-catching as possible.

I’d like to experiment with a few unconventional features too though, for example putting the masthead at the bottom of the page. However I wouldn’t recommend this as they’re meant to be at the top. I will be experimenting with unconventional features to gain experience and the knowledge of how abstract magazines look. I will gain an understanding for what unconventional magazines contain and what the most important features of one are. I will also be able to compare the 2 styles of magazine and conclude by deciding which type of magazine style is my favourite.