EVALUATION - Question 1: 'In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?'

My music magazine uses many conventions of other music magazines. The most obvious convention followed is that my magazine solely concentrates on the music industry, though it does not necessarily focus entirely on the artists performing the music like some other music magazines. For example, my magazine also features some music producers and music moguls (see contents page), and this could therefore be seen as a challenge of this convention. There are conventions which can be seen – for example – on my front cover and contents page, and these are used basically and typically. Examples of such conventions are a masthead, list of features, headline and byline. By using these conventions, I have almost created a brand identity, as I have made it obvious first and foremost that my media product is a magazine, but also, on further analysing these conventions, I have made it obvious that my magazine is of the music genre; for example the list of features on the contents page includes ‘on repeat; the week’s hottest singles’ and ‘live and loud; your guide to gigs’.

There are also some conventions which I have developed in my own music magazine. For example, on my front cover, next to the barcode there is a small quotation which is visible. This quotation is a lyric by the artist featured on my front cover, and this is a development and imitation of an idea that I saw on the cover of an edition of NME. I decided to use this as I thought that it would create some brand identity for my product, making it more original and memorable. I also hoped that it would give some insight into the type of artist that is featured on my front cover.

One of the main challenges in my magazine is the fact that I only have one real image on my contents page (apart from the photos of my features pages). Though this is not necessarily a traditional convention of magazine contents page, most of the contents pages that I looked at for research had at least three different images on them. I decided to challenge this convention as I felt that the image featured was such a strong photo that it needed a page to itself in order to create a maximum impact. As my features page is quite busy, I wanted my contents page to be a lot more simplistic, and therefore this is why I chose not to include more than one image.

Below is a slideshow which I devised in order to further analyse the conventions of my music magazine.

Media as coursework – music magazine evaluation

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