Social Music Notes

Social Media are still one of the biggest used for the internet age today, but with music falling behind there have been man advances in the music field to combat this lul. The newest and biggest advancement is what has been dubbed Social Music, or Smart Music, This is the idea that whatever you are listening to on your preferred music streaming service will be instantly shown within your social medias allowing people to engage with you about the music that you are currently listening to. This also allows different music services to produce playlist that they think will be suited to you using artists that are similar to the ones you have alrready listened to and or have shown interest in.

One of the biggest changes in recent news is the announcement of Google : All Access. This is googles attempt to break into the music streaming service hoping to knock Spotify and all of the other big players in the industry to the top of the charts. But the one difference in Google's approach is that there will be no freemium model which Spotify, Grooveshark and pretty much all other music streaming services offer, this has come as a shock as google is taking a huge risk in being the only subscription only streaming service available.

Globalisation Post

The term Globalisation is a term that is closely associated with Marshall McLuhan. It was widely popularised in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) And Understanding Media (1964). McLuhan described how the world has become contracted by the user of electrical media, which in McLuhans time would have been the radio. Even though the orignal idea was developed with the radio technology in mind this can easily be transferred to the internet as the newest and biggest electrical technology that has been introduced to the modern world. because of this globalisation the social spheres that have developed within the world, or tribes if you will have been greatly expanded due to how easy it if to find people with the same interests people can easily search for forums and messageboards created for people with the same interests and then get involved within the community straight away. One of the industries that the Global Village term can be easilly associated with would be the music industry, and this is down to many reasons.

The music industry has been a masssive market with music being sold to many different countries but I would never class the music market as global until one of the most recent events. The main reason for this would be the language barrier and other factors such as regional tastes in music, but one music event has radically changed the way in which the music market could be being recieved in the future. The event I am talking about is the release of Psy's Gangnam Style. With the release of Gangnam Style the western market has become obsessed with music that they cannot even understand the lyrics to, this shows a giant move forward to a global market in which the music market is not hindered by the limits of language or other regional factors.

The Second Screen

The second screen is the use of another device while watching or engaging with content on one device which would usually be a TV, additional context information and content is given to the user using another device, this cna typically be a mobile smartphone, tablets or a computer screen. The second screen is exactly what it sounds like, the use of another device or screen to show additional information about the live TV show that is being shown, this can be on many devices in the form of an App or website and helps to make the TV experience more social and may also help to reduce priacy. An example of this would be Britains Got Talent with the available app giving information on the contestants when they are preforming.

Zach Braff Crowdsourcing

Zach Braff is currently running a kickstarter to fund the production of his new film "Wish I Was Here". Kickstarter is the leading website that is used to crowdfund projects with projects ranging from video games to food projects, if the people like the idea then they have the choice to pladge money to the project to see it actually get made. This has led to many high profile Kickstarters being made but non have been as successful as Zach Braffs new film which has the goal of raising $2Million within the month, but only one and half days into the kickstarter campaign it has already raised $1.7Million. This is a huge success for Zach Braff and means that the Movie will most definately be getting made as there is a huge backing for this film, it also shows the power of crowdsourcing showing that a substantial amount of money can be raised in a very short time if there is a market for it.

Braff says that he was about to sign a contract to obtain the money from a studio but after the recent success of the Veronica Mars kickstarter he thought there emay be chance that this could happen for his film allowing him to have full artistic control over the film which he would not have if he had gone and signed the financing contract.

Easter Research

Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky can be described as a man of many talents. He is an American Writer, consultant and teacher on the Social and Economical effects of internet technologies.The later of these accomplishments is why he is so suited to the Media in the Online Age course. Shirky has been writing and has been getting interviewed about the internet since about 1996 which gives him a vast knowledge of the internet and how it has developed over time. But, Shirky like to focus his knowledge on the networking technologies such as Peer-to-Peer networks and Wireless networks. Shirky is a huge believer of using crowd-sourcing and this can be seen by reading his book, Here Come Everybody. He uses the phrase "The Internet Runs On Love" to describe the nature of how crowd-sourcing works, saying that the internet runs solely on the power of people gathering and sharing their information.
As Shirky is a firm believer that the internet is a huge force that can be used for the greater of everyone  he is one of the Cyber-Utopians that Evgeny Morozov is very sceptical about and because of his feeling about the internet he was also completely against the SOPA and PIPA acts that tried to get written into legislation early 2012 giving talks such as "Why SOPA is Bad" to emphasise this point.

David Gauntlett
David Gauntlett is a British Sociologist and Media Theorist who's work concerned contemporary media audiences but has later shifted his interest into the everyday marketing and sharing of digital media and social media which is once again like Clay Shirky why he is such a great source for the Media in The On-line Age course.  The major thing which David Gauntlett is known for it his use of the Term Web 2.0 which in a nutshell describes how the internet as a whole medium for media is becoming more and more interactive as the days go by. This can be seen as a huge transition from the old web that is now called Web 1.0 in which users of the internet would just consume the information that they were being given without contributing in anyway to it, this has radically changed now with the rise of Wikis, the need for features like commenting on websites allowing users to voice their opinions about certain media articles on the web but most importantly and the biggest the huge rise in Social Media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. These are the sites that have turned the average internet user from a normal consumer to an everyday prosumer, meaning that they not only not only consume the information that is now on the internet but also can contribute and produce their own for the whole web to see.

Example Of Wikinomics
One of the best examples for Wikinomics that I can ever think of for the Media in the Online Age would have to be the Linux OS Distribution. Linus is an operating system that was first created by one person leading a small group of programmers. The first release was then sent as open source and free for the rest of the world to contribute to and has now evolved into thousands upon thousands of programmers contributing code each and everyday working to make the overall project better and better.

Music Magazine Analysis

Research and Planning
From looking back through my old AS blog I have been looking at the research and planning that I have put into the production of my music magazine. First of all I decided upon a genre and from this I decided to create a google questionnaire to ask some general questions to a wide variety of people such as Do you purchase music magazines? How much would you spend on a music magazine? What would you expect to see in a music magazine? What incentives would attract you to a magazine if any (e.g. free posters, exclusive interviews)?. I then collated the information that I received and then used this to play what I would be including in my magazine due to what was the most popular answer, this being a free poster and exclusive interviews and I also used this to help decide on the price that I would be marketing the magazine for. Next I went and researched many different real life texts, all of which where the genre of the magazine that I would be creating. This was the most valuable research that I carried out as it allowed me to see the codes and conventions that are used within the magazine market in the genre I wanted so I could easily implement them into my own magazine helping to make it more appealing to my target audience and also made it look more professional as it stuck to all of the codes and convention that are present within the metal music magazine genre e.g. dark / dull colours, big bold in your face text, casual but professional language used within interviews.

Post Production
For the post production of my music magazine for my AS portfolio I predominantly use Adobe Photoshop as this is basically the industry standard for any sort of image manipulation. This was good as we started to learn different image manipulation techniques that we could then use within out magazines to make the Text and also the Pictures featured within them to look the best they could. Some of the techniques we learned were using the Spot Healing Tool to get rid of unwanted litter on the floor, colour correction / colour substitution which was used to create different effects within photos such as the Danger Of Death album cover photo within my magazine. Through the use of Photoshop we completely changed the way in which the original images looked helping to make them look more professional by sticking to the codes and conventions that I found out from my research and also made them look more professional by modifying them with different effects. The digital technologies that we used will fall under this category as the main technology that we used was Adobe Photoshop, this is because it is one of the most powerful image manipulation software packages that is available and allowed us to edit our photos from our photo shoot to make them look more appealing and also make them look more professional. We also used prezzi for our evaluations which helped us to create a more exciting yet still informative evaluation instead of normal and boring Powerpoint presentation.

Using Conventions from Real Media Texts
While creating the music magazine for my AS media portfolio I made sure to research what the codes and conventions of real media text would be, I did this mainly by getting many different real media music magazines of the genre that I was going to create and then analyse them to see what the general codes and conventions where within these. First of all with the genre of metal I found that the use of colours was mainly of a much more dark and dull colour pallet giving a more dark feeling to the magazine which is very closely associated with the genre of metal music itself, this is why I chose to make my Masthead white text on black background and also why I decided to apply a sepia filter over the main image of my front cover to take some of the colour out without going into a fully black and white picture which I felt looked cheap unless done correctly. Next I found that most of the fonts and text used within the metal magazines where very big and bold and mostly serif fonts. This gave them an edgy and in your face look which helped to grab the readers attention and also once again related to the genre of metal music itself. This is why most fonts used within the magazines that I created are serif, a large size and also bold to stick with this convention of metal magazines. Lastly while researching what the language used within interviews was like within metal music magazines interviews I discovered the most magazines had a very casual approach using swear words and colloquial language, this helped the user associate with the interviewee and also once again stuck to the representation of metal music that they do not stick to the norm and have a very rebellious attitude to authority that they can display by using coarse language.   

Preliminary Task Comparison

This is the preliminary task that I created for my AS Portfolio work. As you can see from even just a very quick glance this is not the best school newsletter ever created, and there are many reasons for this. To start with is the font, Comic Sans, which is widely known to be one of the most hard to read and generally worst fonts to use in any professional media production, this brings down the whole professional look of the newsletter which is of course bad. Next is the images and while the images themselves are not that bad, which we will talk about later, the blocky unfeathered nature in which the images have been placed on the newsletter is not very appealing, this once again brings down the professional look of the newsletter and makes it less appealing to the eye.

But even though this is not the best newsletter there are some things that I think work quite well in this. First of all being the colour scheme that has been used, blue, red and white, which are the colours of Deyes High School. This helps the audience associate this newsletter with the school and also makes the newsletter look slightly more appealing to people who may be reading is as the colours work quite well together. One other good thing is the use the school logo in the top right of the newsletter, this helps it to look a lot more professional as the logo instantly makes it associated with the school and gives a sense of authenticity to the newsletter. Lastly I feel that the images I have used within this newsletter are very good and this is down to a few reasons. One of these being that both of the images that have been used follow the Rule Of Thirds convention in photography making the images look a lot more appealing to look at than if they had not been taken with Rule of Thirds in mind. Also both of the images are related to the school and both give a good representation of the school just by looking at the images alone, this is good as it makes the newsletter more appealing at just a quick glance and may draw in more peoples attention.

This is the finished magazine front cover that I created for my AS Portfolio work. As you can see when compared with the preliminary task (Newsletter above) this looks very professional and a lot more appealing to look at even at just a quick glance, there are many reasons for this. First of all in the time between the preliminary task I was taught how to use Adobe Photoshop Elements which allows for a more professional looking product to be produced when compared with Microsoft Publisher which was used in creating my preliminary task, also I was able to do a lot more research on magazine front covers which allowed me to stick to tried and tested conventions within the genre of music magazine that I wanted to create helping to create a more professional looking magazine. Secondly I have used a much more appealing font on my magazine allowing for viewers to quickly read what is on the front cover quickly which in turn may grab their attention if they are interested with what is written on the front of the cover, this also helps the magazine to look a lot more professional when compared to my preliminary product. The masthead on my magazine front cover also stands out a lot more than the newsletter with the big and bold white text on the black background. The effects placed on the Main Story of my magazine also help to grab the attention of the viewers and make the magazine once again more professional to look at. The incentives banner, puff and barcode on the front of the magazine are all conventions of music magazines that you would expect to see on pretty much any music magazine, therefore I implemented them into my magazine to stick to the conventions of real life media helping to make the magazine look authentic and professional. Lastly the Main image used within my magazine instantly grabs the viewers attention with the sepia tone mask and also the Rule of Thirds once again makes the image more appealing to look at helping the general feel of the magazine to look more appealing.