Creating a piktochart has allowed me to understand the competition involved within the magazine industry and how this helps producers to create their products. By researching magazines which involve my genre of music has showed how each magazine is ‘the same but different’ and what regulary appears on Indie magazines. I have focused on who they interview, what features are included, what is available to the audience, how the readers interact with artists and editors which has then allowed me to understand what I will need to include in my magazine in order to reach my targeted audience. This task has shown me how Indie magazines inform, entertain, connect to the audiences personal identity and how they socially interact helping me to have a better understanding of the competition and how to make my magazine stand out from others.

 

My Music Genre:

For My Music Magazine my genre of music will be Indie Pop which includes pop conventions and structures with a lightheartened and medolic sound. Some popular artist who have created indie music are, Girl In Red, Billie Eilish, Lana Del Ray, Florence+ The Machine. My music magazine will be titled ‘Indiesy’ and include a main cover star as well all the conventions typically seen on indie magazine covers. Within the process of deciding my genre of music to focus on I have created a word cloud wiht everything that will be included in order for to understand the genre and how everything will come together more easily.

Word Cloud:

Mission Statement:

“Indiesy brings together a community of indie music lovers to admire and cherish their all time favourite music. We reveal the new and exciting information on fashion, artists and exciting projects to our audience encouraging our fans to express and reveal their individuality and spark to the world. With the latest information you can find out everything about your favourite artists from home and become apart of our indie community with just a turn of a page.”

By analysing a chosen magazine, Billboard, has allowed me to focus on how the technical and formal conventions brings a magazine cover together and how it focuses on the audiences demographics and psychographics. The deomgraphics is what you can’t change about the audience e.g age, sex, who they are wheras psychograpics goes deeper into what their indivual interets are in order to achieve the targeted audience of a media text. On a magazine cover the design features can be maipulated in order to reach and attract its targeted audience including all components of Mes En Scene and coventions.

On the Billboard magazine the targeted audience is focused on 20+ gender neutral people who are fun seeking, creative and want to express their individual differences. In order for this magazine to reach its audience it has focused on the font type, colour pallette, images, language and how each component is represented. My allocated magazine uses key colours and fonts which connote a modern feel allowing the audience to feel a sense of freedom and indivduality which reaches their audience psychographics aims.

This task will now allow me to focus on all the technical and formal coventions on a magazine cover to meet my intended audience as well as understanding the audiences demographics and psychographics in order to match their interests. It will help my music magazine to focus deeper into the reasons evrything is presicely chosen in order to relate back to my targeted audience and how it can affect them.

Annotating an allocated magazine with all the technical and formal convention features on the front cover has enabled me to learn the media language for each of these features as well as being able to locate them. This has allowed me to understand how all magazines are extremely similar with their conventions making them recognizable as a magazine to the audience. All magazines include these basic conventions but having their individual differences in order for their targeted audience to recognize their magazine every time it is issued. The basic conventions included in most magazines; masthead, cover lines, main cover line, main cover star, barcode, price, plug, pug, insets and captions.

For example, on Music Week, the magazine we annotated, there is a main cover star, Lana del Rey, who is the main focus displayed on the cover. This draws the audiences attention here allowing them to discover more about the magazine. Another feature included on this magazine is the different cover lines which reveals more ideas about what will be included within the magazine. The composition and layout on the magazine is a basic effect which you see across many other media texts however it is also effective. If you split the cover into nine boxes, each aspect on the front cover is placed there for reasoning, e.g the cover star is centre drawing attention towards here.

Now understanding the ideas about the technical and formal convention features within magazines will enable me to focus on these components on my own magazine cover, making sure everything is included in order for the cover to me effective for my targeted audience.