1. Magazine evaluation
Question 2
Representation of social groups.
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
For my magazine, “Indie-vidual”, I am aiming to appeal fans of the Indie/Alternative rock
music genre. Indie and Alternative Rock are genres which have become popular over the
past decade or so, but with more groups than ever before emerging from absolutely
nowhere, different fans of different artists are becoming increasingly more common.
My magazine does not highlight or represent one particular set of fans. It represents the
whole of the Indie/Alternative rock world as a whole, covering bands like Bastille, Two Door
Cinema Club and Stornoway. The news, articles and quizzes that the magazine features are
all related to the Indie genre itself.
But the first question lies with how my musicians are represented.
For my feature article of my magazine, I came up with the band “RoodePelikaan”, who are a
new Indie band from Eastbourne. The band consists of five members: A main singer, a bass
player, a keyboard/piano player and a drum player. All of these instruments or roles in the
band are stereotypical of the Indie/Alternative Rock genre. So that immediately establishes
them as an Indie band. The next thing that I have done to represent them as the
stereotypical Indie band is naming the location in which they started. Universities seem to
be an incredibly common place for Indie bands to start. An example is Stornoway, who met
at Oxford University. This also represents them as intellectual and intelligent, which is
something that a lot of Indie Bands are. They tend to write songs based on things that are
almost unheard of in mainstream music. These tend to be subjects that are random and
slightly odd – for example Bastille’s song “Icarus”.
I have represented all of my band members as people who are very humble and respected.
Indie/Alternative Rock artists never tend to be cocky or arrogant. They are aware of their
talent but only choose to show it when performing. Away from performing, they are honest
and very professional in their work, whilst artists in mainstream music, i.e. rappers tend to
write songs about how rich and famous they are. I am yet to witness a case where an Indie
artist has been arrogant or rude.

2. Another thing that makes my artists stereotypical to the genre of music is their clothes, the
mise-en-scene, the props and their body language in the photographs that I have taken to
use in my featured article.
Firstly, are the clothes. Indie artists are well known for dressing well and in styles that seem
to tilt away from the mainstream idea of fashion. However, the way that they dress is
quickly becoming the new idea of fashion – especially with young adults and teenagers. A
lot of the clothing that Indie artists tend to wear is slim fitting and smart casual. Items of
clothing such as skinny jeans, button up shirts with strange patterns and suede shoes tend
to be the main sort of attire that Indie artists wear. Very few of these clothing are specific or
famous brands either – so we don’t see much Ralph Lauren or Fred Perry. Indie artists tend
to wear clothes which represent them as a person, or at least their social feelings.
Individualists and “Hipsters” are well known for wearing clothes which they feel shows off
their social ranking in the best way as possible.
The location of the photo shoot is what I have picked as my main stereotypical feature when
representing my magazine.