Evaluation - Target Audience

What would be the audience for your media product? E – Target Audience.

For any media product, defining the target audience is the fundamental value and procedure before making the product itself. Before production, the template of idea needs to be based upon a certain individual or subculture. This definition or stereotype of a person is vital to the products and its procedures of marketing. All advertisements in these products are specifically aimed for that target audience and predicted activities they partake in. Target audience also influences the design of the product, use of fonts and colour and what connotations are perceived by that audience. The purpose of the product again is impacted by target audience, is it to inform, to educate or to entertain. It really shows that the media and products within in the media have an audience. In this case, creating a magazine, we need to fully understand the processes of our audience, things like where they eat out, what clothes they wear, jewellery, television shows, type of language used, and opinions on society are all items to be considered, not just they’re music type.

My target audience is strongly against the mainstream hype of youth subcultures. It goes against the trends of fan-girls, hipsters and chavs. My product’s main focus is to entertain through the sounds of rock music, not through celebrity culture or aspired musical artists. The typical audience is all ranges, however, people who’d like to buy magazines to read, and it would mainly be from a young to middle aged audience. Also, due to rock ‘n’ roll folklore, the audience would be male-orientated., which is evident in my main image being of a male artist. This is further enhanced by the cover line noting several rock bands and artists, all with male members. However, the neutral colour scheme welcomes both genders.

You can’t just have a magazine that explains the music genre, you need to convey this through multiple forms. Using colour can connote different emotions and ideologies to cultures and backgrounds. For example, Goth’s are heavily associated with the colour black as it symbolises Gothic literature and death. For my media product, I went with a black, white and red colour scheme. This was to reflect my music genre of rock music. The black and white links back to the earlier origins of rock, indicating that it represents rock as a whole, not limited to sub-genres or time frames. The black and white can also convey an older aspect of my audience that it appeals to older ranges, with the electric cherry red colour reflecting aspects of a youth for an audience. Black and white colours can anchor the simplicity of the article, being professional and classy, yet easy to understand for all rock lovers.

My target audience needs to be defined by the media products that they use. My ‘ideal reader’ is of a young adult, outgoing, and enjoys listening to a wide range of rock music. They’re the type of people who enjoy eating out at takeaway joints such as KFC, Subway and McDonalds for ease. This idea is replicated in my preliminary task cover in where include a voucher for Greggs. Also, the typical man is one who loves sport. Manly stereotyped sports such as motor racing has been included in my moodboard. This reflects the style of my target audience – outgoing, adventurous and enjoy rock music.

Several music magazines have their own ‘ideal reader’, a typical buyer of the magazine, of whom have their ideologies and musical influence’s which are shared within a group, to form that target audience.  Upon accessing their media kit, Kerrang’s editor, James McMahon said this upon his mission statement.

 “From the younger teenage readers who are more open to different genres of rock music – from emo to thrash etc, to the readers who respect Kerrang! as an authority when it comes to our scene’s heritage bands. Each issue will include a balance of bands and scenes to guarantee that we’re providing for our readers’ need for variety and their passionate appetite for their favourite bands as well as their desire to be introduced to new music within our world. We will focus on the BIGGEST things that are going on in our world each week, as well as guaranteeing that we are giving our main base of younger readers everything they need to get into, on top of this the interest in older, harder bands.”

This reflect the wide variety of audience Kerrang has. This could explain Kerrang’s excessive, yet acceptable use of images, colour and fonts. As a result of this, Kerrang!, has become “The world’s largest weekly music magazine”.

In order to appeal to my audience, my magazine will be released every fortnight. His shows that the article’s written and the content is specially designed and catered to the audiences requirements. The time frame of how long the issue will be available will aid my target audience. As they’re out doing activities and etc., two weeks gives them ample time to purchase, read and more importantly enjoy the magazine before the next issue. I believe this structuring system is more beneficial for the magazines market and success.

I believe my audience would buy my magazine as it offers recommendations on new, obscure artists that are breaking onto the season. On the other hand, classic bands are also included to reminisce about golden olden stages of rock music and how this phenomena has evolved. It also offers the audience insights to rock music itself, the processes and the fame surrounding it. Focus on the music and instruments itself already shows where my magazines focus is at, the music, the connection with the fans (readers). The journalism type is adapted so it’s understandable of music lovers, detailed descriptions of guitars, background information on previous rock moments and stars. (Article refers to ‘Joel Oram’ to work with music producer Rick Rubin – 

Evaluation - Representation

Written and Electronic Drafts

Overview of Magazine Industry

Today, the magazine industry isn’t as prominent as it was in previous years. The print industry seems to be declining whereas the e-media and social media side seems to be ever evolving. Magazines are a centre point of discovering genres and acts as a way to communicate and express yourself through music or shared interests. To combat the magazine’s industry decline, leading music magazines including NME and Kerrang! have launched online and digital versions of the magazine, containing the same content in a digitalized package. The magazine has a wide audience and a wide range of purposes. There are over 8000 published magazine titles in the UK alone. These magazines can classify in under seven different types of magazine.
 1. consumer (general and specialist) sold in newsagents and available online;
 2. business / trade / professional / B2B - for people at work;
 3. customer magazines that organisations to give to their customers as a form of marketing;
 4. staff magazines to inform staff about their company
 5. newspaper supplements - come free as part of daily or Sunday paper;
 6. part works - a set number of issues builds up into an 'encyclopaedia' on a specific topic;
 7. academic journals - for university-level discussion of all sorts of arcane topics.

 My music magazine would be a consumer magazine. The majority would be sold in specialist music shops and the leading entertainment retailer, HMV. The magazine is a consumer specialist as it ties down to a certain interest – rock music. The biggest consumer magazines are Bauer Media Group which accounts for 255 of publishing including Kerrang!. Time Inc. , formerly IPC-Media own 20% of the market followed by our license-fee paying BBC magazine with 7.5%.

 Overall, the magazine industry, despite an average of 500 new magazines have been launched every year in the past decade. Only 3 out of 10 magazines that are released last on the shelf.

Rock Music Questionnaire and Questionnaire Response/Analysis

Evaluation - Skills Development

Full Magazine Analysis - NME (New Musical Express)

For this analysis I will overview the industry and status NME magazine has produced from its launch in 1952. The magazine was the focal point of their company and through the development of e-media and social media, NME as a brand, has expanded to various different formats for it evolving target audience.

The New Musical Express, as its fully known is a British weekly music journalism publication. It provides a wide range of articles and exploratory insights to the world’s greatest bands. The genre of the magazine is associated with rock, indie and alternative music. This genre provides the target audience of people who enjoy listening and participating in these musical events and cultures. The purpose of the magazine was to provide weekly entertainment and information to the audience. This later became a nationally known music hub for music lovers to gather and interact.

The benchmark of NME’s success occurred in 1996. This was the launch of NME.com, an online version of NME. It now stands as the world biggest standalone music site, with over 7 million users per month. The website includes its iconic logo, image slideshows, recent and online exclusive news, ticket information regularly updated. 

Recently, the NME magazine has been released as a digital form on the NME website and a new and improved mobile phone/tablet application.  They provide ease to the audience and can stay connected with new technology. The digital copy provides the same content; however links and QR codes can be incorporated for instant access and content to the user.

NME have also launched several social media pages to keep up to date with the modern day audience. NME Magazine on Facebook, @NME on Twitter and 'nmemagazine' on Instagram all improve direct communications between the brand and the audience.  They often provide links to their website, which remains their hub if activity and consistently release their magazines weekly in all stores.

NME as a franchise is constantly growing, from what has started off as a magazine; it’s evolved across all media platforms. NME has also become part of an influence for clothing and fashion, with indie music’s profile raised; the fashion has impacted from this. Even t-shirts with the NME logo are made, however, not for readers of the product; it’s considered a fashion icon – a true indication of the evolution of this magazine.

The NME TV music awards have also been created, as with Kerrang! Music awards, It seems these two magazine snot only headline the music magazine shelves, yet a global impact on music as a whole. Overall, NME has come a long way since it’s creation by Theodore Ingham in 1952. Now, NME is not only a magazine, it’s an empire and an essential part of music’s evolving life-cycle. 

Finished Media Products - Blue Ark - Feature Article

Finished Media Products - Blue Ark - Contents Page

Finished Media Products - Blue Ark - Front Cover

Evaluation - Technologies

In order to create my media products, I needed to uses a variety of techniques and a range of technology. This was used to enhance the visuals of the magazine, as well as making it have the cutting edge of a slick design format. Not only was different technology and equipment used for creating the products, but also for the research and planning, using web-based software to present my research in a concise and professional manner.

I used the college PC as my workstation. The PC was used to upload and download images (Barcode), use new software, research and many more uses. This PC’s the focal point of my media coursework and is pivotal to his unit. 

First of all, I was introduced to an online site called Blogger. Blogger was very important for the presentation and documentation of my research. Owned by Google, Blogger offers an interface for people to post their findings upon a blog for others to see. For my media coursework, I had to add various items to my blog as the coursework progressed throughout the year. I found Blogger to be a very easy and understandable format to present information and images. I've also acquired skills to embed links to other software’s such as Prezi as a .html format to upload them to my blog in the software’s style. Adding tags to different blog posts can almost add a contents-esque structure. This adds ease of access to my blog posts, going by the section of work, rather than the post date. Blogger has become easier to understand throughout the coursework phase and has become an easy, presentable format of displaying my media research.

FlipSnack is a web-based presentation software used for several of my blog posts. It offers an alternative viewing perspective of information and adds variety and colour to the research, as opposed to plain, concrete word documents. FlipSnack was first introduced during my research and planning phase with my Textual Analysis on existing media products. The concept was easy to understand and learning to embed the codes has become more natural throughout the course. The word documents needs to be saved as a PDF file before being uploaded into FlipSnack. FlipSnack offers a flip-book animation, scrolling through images on one side, with accompanying information and research on the other. Personally, the FlipSnack software is user-friendly and adds a whole new element of variety to my blog. I went on to use this programme for two other blog posts, Moodboard Analysis and my Original Images Photobook. Overall, it’s safe to say FlipSnack is a trust-worthy, reliable web-based software to use. FlipSnack welcomed me to neat presentation and a way of displaying information in a slick, stylish and modern way.

Prezi is another web-based presentation software used for my blog post. In particular, it was used for B: Evaluation: Forms and Conventions. Rather than a word document or PDF file listing the magazine etiquette I used with perhaps a few images, the Prezi software added a suave concept to standard information. It’s smooth flowing transition between different frames displays information in a vibrant manner. Through my experience of Prezi, I found it the hardest software to use and understand. The placement of frames, the transition and the web links can be incredibly complicated to start from scratch. Luckily, Prezi offer templates to give a helping hand for the presentation – which is exactly what I did. I used the mobile/tablet images template, as it is appropriate reflecting the technologies I have use in the process of creating my product. It can also link to the younger aspect of my target audience and the potential to display my product through digital versions as well as social media interaction. A disadvantage of using Prezi is it’s reliability. I've found that on the College Network, Prezi has crashed several times and is very unreliable. Once embedded into my blog, the Prezi format adds professionalism and shows my understanding of new technologies. I've adapted to being introduced to this programme and have found it challenging at first, yet come to grips with the transitions and criteria as I progressed through my evaluation on forms and conventions.

The main fundamental point and the software used to create, edit and improve my three media products is Adobe Photoshop. I’ve had previous experience of a similar graphic manipulation software of Serif Photoplus X2 during my Media Studies course at GCSE level, however, its use was very limited. To say I was, comfortable with Photoshop straight away is an understatement. I found the software difficult to adapt to, with many tools complicating my intended purpose. I used Photoshop for my preliminary task magazine “College Life”. Looking back on the magazine, it looked very un-professional, incorrect use of colours and fonts and the image seemed stretched. This was due to me only just coming-to-terms with the Photoshop software. I began to improve rapidly with the software, by creating four moodboard’s, the audience and the advertiser’s moodboard looking the most impressive. Several tools I used for these Photoshop software is altering the colour saturation. This emboldened, or dimmed images to make other looks prominent. It adds different dimensions to the moodboard and I believe at this point I fully understood the know-how of Adobe Photoshop. There are many advantages of Photoshop including the wider variety of tools to use and array of items you can alter to make more apt for the target audience. With the tools being so vast, I physically, couldn’t use them all, perhaps the only flaw of Photoshop’s design (and it’s not really that bad!). Photoshop was the source of my three media products, my front cover, my contents page and my feature article. The colour abstractor tool was incredibly useful in creating my pull quotes (feature article). The magazines house style was of a black, white and red colour scheme. The red used for the pull quotes was taken from the exact colour of my Jim Deacon Electric Cherry Stratocaster Guitar, which was used as a prop for my front cover, contents and feature article to symbolise the rock genre. This exact colour of the colour was then put into text for contents numbering and the pull quotes, adding consistency to the magazines style. Photoshop is a complex software to learn and adjust to, yet is endless use of tools and capabilities proved to be a vital part of my products creation, indeed.

Another piece of vital equipment used was my personal camera. Rather than booking in for a camera from the college’s media department, I opted for my own camera, with the better graphics and image stabilisation to help shoot a better image for my products. The camera used was a Canon Powershot SX600 HS. I've had previous experience of this camera so was very easy to understand and use. Once image were taken, they were transferred to the college system to be placed in Photoshop and the Original Images FlipSnack presentation.

Accompanying my camera was my camera tripod. This gave me direct and accurate height to shoot the image, as well as maintaining its position to obtain the highest quality image.

My electric guitar and my guitar amplifier was also included in my magazine. These were used as props to convey the rock music scene and to symbolise the rock genre and rock culture.

Overall, I used a wide variety of software, technology and props for my media coursework. They all contributed into the creation of my media products and was used to display my research and hard work in a stylish manner. 

Evaluation - Addressing my Audience

Evaluation - Addressing the Audience

Evaluation - Institutions

Every magazine has a publisher. Whether it be privately owned, or a worldwide institutions such as Bauer. Often, the institutions who choose to publish the magazine need to fully understand the magazines intentions, its market research and of course it’s target audience. Magazines such as Kerrang! And NME are owned by large institutions like IPC-Media (now named Time Inc.) and Bauer Media Group. With these institutions, the magazines they publish all have different genre’s, style and interest group with specific target audience tailored to each magazine. There is also private publishing in where there company only publishes that magazine as part of the magazine brand name, such as Clash magazine. These can be more successful than magazines owned by large institutions as they have a certain niche audience and essentially, the magazine is made for “them”, not for the general public.
As a result, my magazine or media product, Blue Ark, would be privately published. The audience is already vast regarding rock music magazines, with NME, Q, Mojo, Kerrang! And Classic Rock all meeting the criteria of specific rock audiences and sub-cultures. My magazine, appreciates the music, rock as a whole genre, welcoming all sub-genres and branches off the rock empire. As my target audience is for all age groups and rock fans, the idea of being privately owned adds more of a community and sense of unison between the audience/reader and the magazine.
In terms of how the product is going to be presented in the media and how it’s going to be marketed, it will potentially have online capabilities such as digital and tablet versions. Despite the music often being “classic”, it’s an all-purpose rock magazine. Also, it is set at an all-range audience, therefore identifying a possibility for a younger branch of the audience, the tablet version appeals to the younger age range, whereas the print version (hard copy) would appeal to a more older and traditional range. The publishers not only have an impact of marketing and sales, however where you sell it and promote the product can affect its popularity and appeal to the audience.
Shops such as HMV (His Masters Voice) and generic music shops would be appropriate to sell the hard-copy of the magazine. This selling links to the fundamental roots of music, and that this magazine is aimed at an audience who deeply loves rock music, not ones that follow cultural trends and aspired celebrity status of mainstream music magazines. This magazine is for the music itself, the sound, not the fame.
Honestly, it’s hard to pinpoint whether this media product would be a success. With technology ever evolving into bigger and better things, the awe and appeal of print media may significantly decline. Creating online digital versions and social media pages may be a temporary fix to the issue. Nowadays, it is difficult to get hype over a magazine. Institutions and publishers often decline great music ideas and what’s not to say this one may do to. Personally, I believe it’s a great idea, broadcasting the rock community a magazine for everyone. However, whether it would be successful is a different story. NME and Kerrang! Are magazines so well established in the music world that it’s extremely difficult to make space for a ‘new’ magazine. The community has become accustomed to these two giants of the magazine world. Private publishing can create a niche audience, away from the public eye. I believe the ideas and messages this product conveys is worthy of being incredibly successful, however with a large market for multiple music magazines, especially the rock genre with NME and Kerrang, it would be very difficult, to say the least, to become a successful media product.

Evaluation - Forms and Conventions

Location, Props and Costume Report