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.