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.

Tim Berners Lee Speaks About The Copyright Alert System

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/internet-creator-tim-berners-lee-copyright-alert-system-bad-democracy

Online streaming research

Streaming media is not something that is considered a new technology in today's age, yet the rise of online streaming in the last year or so has been massive turning it into a multi millions dollar industry. Streaming media has been around for some time and in its by first form was localised only to people's local networks, allowing them to stream media from one computer to another be it music or films giving them some freedom of where they are able to watch their media from. "Severe Tire Damage" was the first band to perform live on the Internet. On June 24, 1993, and as proof that the technology they had used for streaming was working, the band was broadcast and could be seen live in Australia and elsewhere.

From this the next iteration of streaming was in the form of online video streaming, which was only now possible due to the rise of broadband and ergo higher bandwidth Internet lines, and the biggest intervention from this would be YouTube which still to this day is the biggest video sharing site in the world.

After the rise of YouTube the next improvement to streaming is what we all have now grown to know which would be the likes of Netflix and LoveFilm for Tv and Film streaming and Spotify for music streaming. All of these platforms have a similar business model being that all of services will allow the user to have a free trail of the service for about a month, with Spotify being the only exception as it allows the user to continue using the service for free with certain restrictions, but all of these services allow the user to pay for a subscription giving them unlimited access to the service with no adverts, this sort of business model is refered to as a freemium model which is being seen in quite a few apps in todays market where it saw its rise.

The Role Of iTunes

iTunes is one of the main Music Players in todays current computer systems, it also has the features available to allow users to purchase movies, songs, and TV Series. iTunes was first developed by Bill Kincaid under the name of SoundJam MP. In 2000 Bill's software was bought by Apple who later on January 09 2001 released a version under the name of iTunes. iTunes was originally a Mac only product but later arrived on windows In October after the release of the iPod as this was the only software available to put songs onto your iPod.

iTunes has greatly expanded since its humble beginnings and can now be found on pretty much any system as one of the top used media players to date. And throughout many different iterations and updates all of the features that we have grown to love and use in our day to day lives were slowly added, biggest of all was the iTunes Store which was introduced with Version 4 of iTunes. The iTunes store allowed people for the first time to legally download music from a front end GUI for a very small cost, but included apples own DRM ( Digital Rights Management ) in the form of Fairplay meaning that a song bought from the iTunes store could not be played on more than 5 authenticated computer at once. But the iTunes store has grown a lot since this time and is now offering not only Music to be downloaded legally but also TV, Movies and Podcasts as well as the App Store becoming a massive success with the rise of the iPod Touch and the iPhone.

The Role Of Napster In 2001

Napster is widely known to be one of hte pioneers in peer-to-peer filesharing software that emphasised in sharing music files encoded in the .MP3 format. It was developed by Shawn Fanning, John Fanning and Sean Parker and operated between the dates of June 1999 and July 2001. Napster was believed to be so influential and special as in was one of the first widely available and easily accessable P2P filesharing softwares around and becuase of this quickly grew in size with records showing that Napster at its peak had over 25 Million users sharing over 80 Million songs, the technology backend that also powered Napster was something that made it special as even though it was the first of its kind Napster was still one of the most robust systems created never crashing once even with over 80 Million uploads over its service.

The responce to Napster from both Arists and Comsumers varied significantly over the course of the systems life. Consumers from Napster reaped the benefits of the system and once the ball had started rolling the number of files being downloaded exploded in size, and due to the rise of broadband internet people were able to now download as many of these files as they wanted. But many artists on the other hand felt completely different about Napster, after finding out that many of their new songs and demos had been leaked all over the internet they set out to shutdown these files being leaked at the source which of course led them to napster. The biggest example of this would be Metallica who after finding out the a demo of their soon to be released song "I Disappear" had been leaked on napster compiled a list of everyone on the service who they believed to be sharing thier music, after this they handed a 60,000 page document of the users and demanded that they be banned and that it be made impossible for a metallica song to be shared over Napster, after this many other artists followed suit and sued Napster for copyright infringement and Loss of earnings. But many artists spoke out publically and defended Napster saying that it was a great tool and can be used for promotional uses. A big example of this would be Radiohead and Dispatch, Radiohead had never had a song in the Top 20 Chart but after their experimental album Kid A got leaked on napster the album shot to Number One when it was finally released. Dispatch on the other hand were an indepedant band but due to their music being shared legally over Napster to over 25 Million users they became the first ever independant band to ever Headline the Madison Square Garden.

Napster was later forced to shut down in order to comply with the injunction that was issued on March 5th 2001. On September 24 2001 Napster partially settled the case and agreed to pay the rightsholders $26Million for unauthorised sharing of music and a further $10Million for future licence royalties. Napster then tried to convert to a Subscription based service but ultimately failed and filed for bankruptcy on June 03 2002.

Music Sales Increased For The First Time Since Napster And The Copyright Alert System

For the first time since 1999, which was the last time in which the music industry saw some form of growth, we are seeing some form of increase in the sales within the industry. From then the music industry has seen a decline in sales which is mainly caused by the use of P2P torrenting sites such as ThePirateBay and KAT, but this decline may have finally stopped as recorded music sales have inched up 0.3 percent. If this growth was to continue the predictions will be coming true as last year digital sales have increased by 9%. People have been attesting this growth in the music industry to the availability of the now prevalent ad-funded services such as Spotify, Vevo, Youtube and Grooveshark, all of these sites allowing people to listen to music for either a monthly subscription or for free with adverts interlaced between songs which the revenue is then paid out to the rights holders of the songs on the platforms. So even though we have seen  just a tiny growth in the music industry for the first time in a long while I do believe that this shows that online digital means of sharing music such as Spotify Etc are the way forward for the music industry as even people who admit to pirating music have said that the availability of free online streaming even with ads is one of the main reasons that they have stopped pirating minions.

Secondly as the music industry as usual has been struggling to combat the rising threat of Piracy in the industry, which has been happening since the late 1990's with the rise of broadband internet and Napster, the only way in which the industry has fought back has been through suing 11 year old children and 90 year old women who don't even own a PC. But now the music and film industry have teamed up with five of the major US internet service providers (ISP) and have launched the new six-strike Copyright Alert System. This new system works by the MPAA and the RIAA monitoring peer-to-peer file sharing sites (E.g. torrent sites such as ThePirateBay) and if they catch people sharing copyrighted material they will record the users internet protocol address (IP) and then send it on to the ISP. The ISP's, who are currently Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner and Cablevision, will then send the customer who had that IP a series of six escalating warnings. First strike is a simple notice, next comes the acknowledgement in which the user will confirm that they have been warned, and lastly is a sanction which can be internet restrictions (Capping Upload/Download Speeds) or watching a video about piracy. Even though in practise this system sounds like it could work I myself do not believe that this new system is going to stop/deter anyone from pirating in any way. There have been many attempts to stop online piracy such as CISPA and SOPA, all of which have failed in everyway as people will go to extreme lengths to keep the internet as free as possible, and even if the new proposed system were to be implemented people would find a way around it as they have always done be this in the form of a proxy server or using a TOR client to browse what has been dubbed the underground internet to get the products that they desire. Because of all of these reasons I believe that this new system will crash and burn without even denting the online piracy scene slightly.