AUDIENCE FEEDBACK


Do you feel that my music magazine entices you into wanting to read it?
It does because the first thing that is noticable is its unique theme as opposed to the stereotypical conventions of magazines such as Woman, Take a Break, Sugar, Elle. etc. It also looks very professional in that you keep the same house style throughout the pages, for example colours, font, pictures etc. By placing famous bands as centre of attention on the cover this attracts me to reading it as I want to know what it is about these bands that has made the magazines, possibly allowing me more inside access into the lives of the artists.


What aspects of the magazine do you like the most?
The unique graphic features such as the background around the text on the contents, and the fact that the 'slogan' for the magazine is 'the girl's guide to good music' consolidates the unconventional aspects and themes of it. This appeals to me as a teenage girl who likes music because it is known that most famous music magazines such as Kerrang! and NME are moe masculine, so there is definitely a place in the market for something as new and contreversial as Ibiscus

What changes could be made to improve my music magazine?
Although the page numbers do apply to the theme and house style on the contents page, it would be more convenient to the reader if they were more noticable as the pink/purple font seems to slightly blend in. There could be a different picture of 'Battle of the Bands' on the front cover and the contents page to introduce more variety to the magazine.


I asked 5 people in my media class for their opinion on my music magazine and above is an expample of person's 'audience feedback'

Final copy of music magazine

This is the final of my Indie music magazine for my media coursework. I have kept to a simple colour scheme of black and white background photos and 2 bright colours (pink and blue) for the main house style. The style and size of text has been kept the same with all of the titles and headings at the same style and the text on the inside article is all of the same. The selling line under the masthead is a play on words saying that the magazine is female orienatated, and by using 'girls guide' it is meaning that it is literally a girls guide but it also encorporates the tradition of girls guiding. The magazine is aimed at the typical female 15-25 demographic. All of the photographs are my own work and consist of using my friends as the models and directing them for the use of my magazine.

The contents and inside pages uses all of my own photographs as well as the same colour scheme as on my front cover. All of the ideas for the content on the inside pages are my own ideas including the question and answer section.

My music magazine is of a much higher standard than my college magazine as I feel I had more of an idea of what I was aiming to achieve and how to create it using photoshop and the effects within photoshop.

I wanted to create a predominately female magazine as there isn't much variety for female magazines available. We have many music magazines that appeal mainly to males such as NME and Kerrang! (due to the house style and content) and I wanted to create something different that was for a female audience. I used NRS (National Readership Survey, below) for statistics on the amount of people that read each magazine from fashion to music and gardening to lads mags, and found that overall music magazine were mainly focused on the male readers. NME and Kerrang have togther 572 male readers to the 226 female readers in a sample combined with over 37223 males and females.

If we were to have my magazine published, the publishing company I would chose to go with is-The National Magazine Company. http://www.natmags.co.uk/ "The National Magazine Company is one of the foremost luxury consumer magazine companies in the UK, reaching 14.8 million adults every year. NatMag currently publish 20 magazines and 61% of all ABC1 magazine reading women aged 15-55 engage with a NatMag brand." The magazine publishing company focuses on female magazines with a strong readership aged between 15-55. My magazine focuses on females aged between 15-25, and so because this publishing company is based around females and almost every different magazine available for females, I believe they will know what direction they need to take the magazine and how to work with it.

Using technology to help create my magazine was a great help. With the use of a computer and photoshop i was able to redo mistakes and change aspects of the magazine that I wasn't happy with, which was easier to do than drawing it on paper and having to start from scratch again. As I am not a skilled artist, creating the masthead and banner/tagline would have been difficult and not worked successfully if I had to draw them myself. This was not a problem as we had a font maker to use on http://www.dafont.com/, which worked by typing in the word that we wanted and it created the word in the font style that we had chosen. Photoshop was especially useful because it is created for making projects such as magazines and therefore I was able to move photos into various positions, change the colours, remove aspects of the photos and the magazine and add extra items that I wanted to be featured on the magazine. The layering on photoshop was used to place different photos and text plates on top of each other and move them so that they can fade in and blend in with the different photos. I used the camera to take my own photos and by doing this rather than using photos that are from the internet it meant that I was able to create the look that I wanted, and move the model how I wanted her to be, rather than having to make do with someone else's work. Overall technology has proved a massive help in creating the magazine and without it the work would likely to be the standard of primary school.

First draft of music magazine front cover and contents page

This is the original idea for my front cover and contents page of my Indie music magazine. I chose not to use these as my final copy because I didn't feel it had a strong enough look that was as clear as it should be for an Indie music magazine. I tided up the look of the fron cover and contents page and kept to the convetions of the traditional look of a music magazine. I used a strong house style with my main colours being-pink, blue and black and white.

The word document, above, contains the initial planning that I made for the contents of the article and the various types of fonts I could use as well as how I was going to set up my photoshoot. The font styles came from the website http://www.dafont.com/. The document to the right is planning of the layout of how I could have had the magazine and the type of background I could have used. I chose to not follow these conventional ways and go with my own ideas of the layout to create a new format and magazine style. I have included the first draft of my inside article, this hasn't been used as my final draft because it has too many balnk spaces and not enough colour to draw people's attention in, also the layout is not of the typical conventions of a magazine (it is not in columns).


This annotated magazine cover with The Who as the main article has been used to help me learn what the different areas of a magazine are and how and what they are used for.

Planning for my music magazine

The genre of muisc I am creating my magazine around is Indie. I choose the genre of Indie because most of the music I listen to is Indie or Indie based. The term Indie is used to describe independence from major commercial record labels and a Do-it-yourself-approach to recording and publishing.
Independent labels have been known to strive for minimal influence on the artist they represent, avoiding the artist-cultivating behavior of many major labels. Artists represented by Independent labels have been known to be focused more on producing music than becoming wealthy and/or well known.

Above is a section of my questionnaire that I created to help define what house styles people generally prefer when buying a magazine (what catches their eye and helps to encourage them to buy the magazine), what topics people like reading in a magazine and how much they would pay for a magazine and how often they buy magazines of any types. I have also included links to interviews with different music artists which explains what inspired them to create the music they do and the feelings behind the songs.

To find the final images that I wanted to use, I took alot of photos to have a large selection to chose from. This helped to give me more photos to work with and use in various ways on the magazine aswell as having backups if I changed my mind about the type of magazine I was creating or the audiece it is aimed for. Here is just a samle of a few of my images.

Research into music genre-Indie

These are examples of album covers from artists who fall under the genre of Indie. The covers show very artistic styles and are very expressionist of the musicians personal music style and the music they have produced for the albums.

Here is the word document of my research into Indie and Indie Pop artists. I have included case studies of artists who fall under the genre of Indie/Indie Pop. These artists include-Florence and the Machine, MGMT, The Smiths, The Cardigans and Nouvelle Vague.

Week commencing 16th November-Music Magazine

For the research behind my music magazine I looked into the National Readership Survey website to find out what magazine is the most popular for women and men and different age groups. I found that the most popular magazines for adults in total were Television magazines such as-Whats on TV and Radio Times. The likes of Kerrang and NME are in the middle region of the survey with being most popular with males over females and 15-44 year olds than over 45s.

The front covers from the music magazine SENTIMENTALIST use very vivid images and layouts that stand out and stay in my mind for a long time. They are very simplistic yet effective because they get to the point of what they are advertising and who they are featuring, rather than clustering up the cover with offers and random slogans and images. The magazine is based around Indie and Rock music which is relevant to the genre I am basing my music magazine on (Indie).

This is the front cover and the contents page of my college magazine. I photographed the feature article photo myself and added the masthead and the cover lines. The idea and creation of the magazine front cover is my work.

In my opinion my contents page could do with alot of improvement. I kept with the same style of text as on the front page and the same positioning. To improve I could have moved around the positioning of the text and the background image to make it have more of a wow factor. The text could be lareger and of a different style to make it stand out more, and the page numbers should really be at the end of the text rather than at the beginning.