Q1: in what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Essay form

Question1: in what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

When making a music magazine, it is vital to have the typical conventions of a music magazine. The likeliness of it having the same features of a music magazine, will often determine the success of the magazine, as the more it looks and feels like a real music magazine is the more people will think its genuine and is worth competing with the well known music magazine on the shelves in the major shops.

My magazine has many conventions of a real music magazine. Firstly, I have tried to make the theme of the magazine as similar to a hip-hop/rap magazine as possible as it has maintained consistent throughout the magazine and doesn’t change that drastically. However I haven’t tried to make my magazine as similar to every other similar genre of my magazine, I have tried to make it as unique as possible so it would then therefore have a unique selling point.

Here is a screenshot of the front cover of my music magazine, from the front page you can see some typical stereo type features on the front in the image for example the hood is up, you can see a microphone. The facial expressions are very serious throughout my magazine too. This would be a typical convention of a rap magazine, as it wouldn’t be the happiest of artists who feature in it. On the front cover page, you can see many things you would normally see in a music magazine, for example, the date it was issued at, the price of the magazine and the barcode on the front which would be used to scan at the shops, In my magazine, when making it, I actually used a real custom barcode for my magazine and a real QR code which you could scan them and it would actually work.

 The sell line included in my magazine also relate to conventions of real magazines as they usually feature big bold mastheads and sell lines too which I have included in mine too. For images I used in my magazine, often typical conventions feature a woman which would be said to be seen in a sexual way which would be used to attract certain audiences, in my magazine, I have chosen to go to the opposite approach as although sexually explicit images can often attract males, it would attract them enough to buy the magazine rather than just viewing them. So therefore males are more likely to buy an image if it contains images of artists which they can relate to so I used that convention of my magazine as an alternative.