Eleanor Williams Media Studies 45509

Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

My magazine has successfully represented the male youth of this generation and the heavy metal fans alike. I had to do it this way because it is stereotypical for males to like metal and rock music, whereas females are stereotypically more likely to like pop bands and female singers rather than a heavy band like Avenged Sevenfold, which I have included on the front cover of my magazine. Demographically, my target audience tends to like punk rock music, and fits the conventions that I put onto my target audience mood board, for instance, wearing clothes that have band logos on them and other band merchandise. Also, this target audience tends to wear clothes and styles that consist of blacks, greys and other dark colours. I have represented this by using this set of colours and clothing in my magazine, whereas in young girls’ magazines and pop magazines, the clothes, outfits and make up would be a lot cleaner, in this magazine, the clothes are a lot more rugged, worn and darker. I have represented this genre of music by representing the demographic that like this genre of music, although I have challenged it slightly by putting in female models instead of male models, as conventionally, there would be male models in this genre of magazine, representing the target audience of males. But because I have challenged this, it means that more females may read the magazine.

In my magazine I have reinforced stereotypes by talking about different tours, gigs and different merchandise that can be won, as well as topics that only young adults would understand compared to young teenage girls, such as talking about the deaths of recent stars and new members of bands that have just been accepted, whereas young girls’ magazines would be about boys, makeup, clothes etc. This suggests that these are the interests that my target audience has, because this is what they want to read, if they didn’t want to read this then my ideology of consumerism would completely fail as the target audience wouldn’t be interested and it simply wouldn’t sell. Some people tend to buy magazines just for the competitions and exclusive posters that are in the magazine, so in my magazine I have also included these features, basing them on the genre of music that they like, for example, the posters I have included are images of fairly popular rock-punk music bands that the readers are likely to know and want to gain posters of. My use of colour, i.e. black, red, yellow and white attracts my audience in a certain way because the audience is used to seeing these types of colours as they are conventional and also the colours that they tend to wear. The language I have used in my magazine has contained some swearing and some taboo language but this is stereotypically how this audience speaks and they are used to it as most of these songs have swearing in them anyway. This would be a different situation if my magazine was targeted to a young audience as they would be too young to use this language towards. The photos I have used have quite aggressive poses in them from the models and the facial expressions are everything but happy, but this doesn’t really represent the audience, as not everybody who listens to this genre of music is everything but happy, this is just usually how the bands and artists pose in their photos. If you asked someone outside of this target audience they would see this group of people as depressed and angry because of these magazines and how these bands act in music videos and at gigs, but in reality these people are just passionate about getting their music and its message across to the people, and that’s what these images do.

Eleanor Williams Media Studies 45509

Note the colour similarities between my magazine and the Kerrang magazine. I wanted to use something similar in order to attract the same audience. Although, I have used a slightly different image to what is on the Kerrang magazine front cover as mine was of a solo model, so I believed this posture and position suited it a lot better. The hair in my magazine is scruffy and unkempt, the angle, the lighting and shot type are all very similar though.

I used a similar layout to this contents page and I used similar colours. Although, my image has a solo artist again and the lighting is quite different. However, the same sort of connotations come from the main image and fit the stereotypes and conventions of this genre of magazine.

The colour scheme I used in my double page spread was very similar to the one of the layout I was using to base mine upon. I used the stereotypes that I found in this magazine, such as the pose and facial expression and used it in my magazine making mine more suitable to my target audience and their preferences.