We were set the task of annotating a music magazine cover in order to establish the brand identity and relating factors. The task was designed to help us to be able to recognise what parts of a magazine cover display the brand identity, and the effects this consequently has on the reader and rest of the magazine as a whole. This will be useful when we are creating our own music magazine covers, as we will be required to come up with a brand identity in order to make it realistic and effective.
The first magazine I decided to annotate was an edition of the New Musical Express (NME) which was released on 10th July 2010. It featured Caleb Followill from American band Kings of Leon on the cover. I have included my annotations of this magazine, and also of Q magazine from September 2010 featuring Lady Gaga, Jay-Z and Dave Grohl, below.
Our task was to pick a magazine cover of our choice from the Internet, and to label it with the forms and conventions we had learned about in the lesson. These included comments on the house style, brand identity and mode of address. This exercise allowed me to further practise my ability to identify the use of these terms and to continue to recognise the effects they have on the magazine as a whole. This will be useful when I am creating parts of my own music magazine later on in the course, as I will be able to use these forms and conventions to create a realistic representation of the appropriate media article; and to make it succesful.
Our task was to research Smash Hits magazine, and we had to present our findings to the rest of the class. We had various areas we had to cover, including:
-The history and success of that magazine (sales figures etc).
-Who it's target audience is and how you know.
-What it can offer to media consumers.
-What it's plans are for the future.
By doing this task, not only did we learn about the above points for the specific magazine, but also because other groups did different magazines we also learned to be able to recognise the forms and conventions of many magazines in general. For example, we discovered how to determine the target audience for a magazine; using it's features to do so. 'Q' magazine is for an older, mass audience becaues it covers a range of different types of music and is renowned for its' high quality photography, whereas 'Smash Hits' magazine contains crosswords and puzzles, as well as block and feminine colours. These factors lead us to believe that it was created for a niche market of youg teenagers and children who are predominantly female and interested in pop music.
Below is our group's slide show on 'Smash Hits' magazine.
I have started this post to share all of my research for my AS Level in Media Studies. For our first piece of coursework, we are going to be creating the cover page, contents page and a double page spread of a Music magazine. Therefore, this blog is going to contain all of my research and any other work I do in preparation for this project.
