Conventions of real music magazines.

My music magazine uses forms and conventions of real music magazines of my genre via the way in which the front cover is presented. I looked at a number of music magazine front covers before creating my own. I annotated these covers to get a real idea of what methods have been used to attract their audience and how headlines and pictures have been layed out to create a synthetically attractive cover.

The two covers I deconstructed in my scrap book were Clash and Vibe. Clash has a more open audience than the product I created, my own cover, DPS and contents page were a lot more similar to those used by music magazine Vibe. This is because Vibe has a similar audience to mine and represents the same music genres to mine. By deconstructing Vibe I was therefore able to see the type of magazine and features that fans of a hip hop and R&B genre music would be attracted to.

The main points I picked up on by looking at this cover was the use of a bright colour teamed with black and white to create contrast, making the model on the cover stand out more. I also picked up on the use of a lyric, 'What's love got to do with it?', to both represent the genre (this lyric has been taken from a popular and almost classic R&B song) and nature of the story - made clear by both this headline, the look on the models face and the mention of 'Rihanna' and 'Chris' - referring to Rihanna and Chris Brown who had received a lot of publicity for their relationship. This use of both the artists first name (although Rihanna really is just Rihanna) and no mention of their surname indicates that the reader/target audience will already be familiar with the artists and creates an almost friendly link between the magazine and the stars, hinting that they are regular features.

I included these conventions in my own product by using bright colours combined with black and white since this creates a modern look - this being important since my audience was . I thought that the use of a lyric to indicate the nature of the song was key since it instantly suggests the genre of the magazine since anyone who perhaps did not pick up on this link is unlikely to be interested in the particular genre. I also thought it was a clever and original headline and therefore incorporated it into my own magazine. However, unlike Vibe, which is also aimed at an older audience slightly exceeding mid-20s and hence has used an older lyric (released in 1993), I used a very recent lyric 'No broken-hearted girl', from a Beyonce song released in 2009. This is to portray and appeal to my audience as well as create a catchy and effective headline relating to my main story, used in my DPS.

In my scrap book I commented on the typical conventions of a music magazine, these conventions consisted of: Reviews, Events, Promotions, Photos, Cover pictures, New Releases, Interviews, Headlines, News, Advertisements, Letters and Double Page Spreads. My magazine uses most of these conventions, for example my front page includes headlines and photos and my contents advertises features within including reviews, interviews, news, events, letters and new releases. I decided to use the typical conventions of a music magazine because my target audience was aged late teens to early twenties, making them young adults. A more mature audience would be more likely to be genuinely interested in music and hence I decided not to challenge the conventions. This is because by challenging the conventions I would be creating an original and individual magazine, the connotations of which would be more likely to attract a teenage audience and hint at an indie genre. However, I developed the conventions by including fashion features in my magazine, my contents page advertises such features as 'Who's wearing what?', 'Put a Spring in your step' and 'Brands'. These all indicate fashion articles, 'Put a Spring in your step' more specifically advertising 'How to look good this season'. By including fashion I have highlighted the fact that fashion and music taste often go hand in hand. This is particularly true for R&B and Hip Hop, the chosen genre of my magazine. This helps to appeal to my target audience, as well as portray the genre of my magazine and present the fact that appearance and 'Brands' are a large part of this genre. I also portray this by dressing my model in an Adidas 'hoody' - this helps to promote
the brand (a typical convention of a music magazine) by dressing a respected artist in the brand. This particular brand is also closely associated and hence implies a more urban genre of music.

I also decided to use the typical conventions of a music magazine since the feedback from my target audience highlighted that most of these conventions were actually desired by my readers. Most stressed the importance of the inclusion of such conventions as events, reviews and new releases. Hence I made sure to include them and decided not to make any vast developments on this convention since they are so straight forward anyway and it's likely that readers would be interested in these features in the simplest form since these are features that many buy music magazines for. My audience did not rate fashion articles as being particularly important but I used this convention anyway again to highlight its relation with music taste.