The document discusses the media product created by the student, a music magazine for the R&B genre. It uses conventions of real magazines such as mastheads and images but challenges other R&B magazines by being a physical rather than online publication. The magazine develops conventions like color schemes but also challenges them by incorporating gold. Through audience research, the magazine aims to attract its target audience of 18-25 year old males.

1. Question 1- In what ways does your media
product use develop or challenge forms
and conventions of real media products.
• The music magazine which I have created for my media product uses many of the main
conventions of real media products including mastheads, main images, secondary images,
tag lines, puffs and many more. Each of these conventions serve a purpose in encouraging
and persuading my target audience to purchase and read my magazine as they have been
designed to suit my target audience in particular from the audience research that I carried
out. My music magazine challenges other RnB music magazines as there are not many of
this genre available and those that are tend to be of an online format whereas mine will be
a physical published copy available to purchase in stores. However, when acknowledging
the importance of the media I have included web links for my magazine page as there
would be an online version that viewers could also use. This is advertised throughout my
magazine to maximise publicity and awareness. My magazine develops other forms and
conventions of existing magazines such as the colour schemes of reds, blacks and whites
which I have found is a typical colour scheme for a lot of magazines of this genre. Due to
this, I decided to use this as my own colour scheme as it clearly works well with the
target audience and is professional. However, I decided to incorporate gold into my front
cover and DPS as they featured the same model and I liked the connotations of royalty
and luxury that it reflected. I also found that gold was a very popular colour for RnB
CD’S and music videos when doing research and so thought this would work well.

2. Question 2- How does your media products
represent particular social groups?
• Given that the majority of my target audience are males around 18-
25, it is likely that the social grade of this reader ship will range from
C2-E as a lot of them are still of a young age and so will not be in
top occupation positions in their careers yet. Or could still be in
education such as college or university in which case they would fall
into social grade E. The advertisements and images that I have used
throughout my magazine tend to portray this social group as laid
back with a sporting nature. the costume of my model and the props
that he is using and the graffiti background of some of the images
help to connote this idea of my target audience. For example, the
basket ball prop that is visible in some of my secondary images
portrays the athletic nature of the social group and the graffiti walls
in the background, along with the costume of my model indicate the
stereotypical raw nature of my target audience.

3. Question 3 - What type of media institution my
distribute your media product and why?
• Bauer, a magazine institution which distributes other products such as Mojo and Kerrang.
Bauer is currently Europe’s largest and most successful privately owned publishing
group. The company publishes over 300 magazines in 15 countries. The existing
magazine which I have researched, VIBE, is currently distributed by intermediate
partners which is private equity. They distribute their magazine through their online page
which allows their target audience to browse through some of the articles contained in the
magazine. It is also distributed in other areas ranging from local shops to supermarkets
and has been done this way since it was first produced by Quincy Jones in 1993.
Although vibe Is distributed by intermediate partners, I feel like Bauer would be a better
choice for my own magazine because it would be more likely to help my magazine reach
mass media scales rather than a small scale audience like a lot of existing RnB
magazines.
• I believe that there is a gap in the market for my magazine of my chosen RnB genre
because there are not many existing products of its kind that are actual magazines rather
than online articles.
• So because BAUER is a very successful distributing company they would have a bigger
budget to use on expenses to make my magazine the best it could possibly be to attract
more readers, e.g. more freebies and better features.

4. Question 4-Who would be the audience for
your media product?
• When starting to put together ideas for my magazine I created a
survey which I would ask a sample of people in my proposed
audience of males and females aged 18-25 relevant questions to get
an idea of their interests in RnB/rap. First of all I had to distinguish
whether the people in my sample liked this genre and so this was my
question otherwise following answers would have been irrelevant. I
continued to ask questions about their hobbies, interests, likes and
dislikes which was really helpful in allowing me to understand the
personalities of my target audience. From my results I was able to
create a reader profile of all of the things that related to my target
audience which I would incorporate where possible into my
magazine. I found that the best target group for my magazine would
be males aged 18-25.

5. Question 5- How did you attract and
address your audience.
• To attract and address my audience I used my results from my survey
and reader profile to incorporate their likes and interests into my
magazine so that the magazine would feel more relatable to them. For
example, my target audience survey indicated that the majority of my
target audience attended gigs several times a year and so a puff on my
front cover is about 5 lucky readers being able to win tickets for an
Eminem gig. To make my magazine stand out to my target audience
more than other existing RnB magazines I made sure that my product
had its own brand identity.
• This included the contrast between the dark and light colours throughout
the magazine, particularly on my front cover. This is because this is the
page that the audience see first and will associate with the magazine. The
unique selling point of my magazine also helped to attratc my audience,
this was the exclusives that were mentioned on my contents page as my
target audience survey indicated that my readers like to see exclusive
images and interviews.

6. Question 6-What have you learnt about
technologies through the process of
constructing this product?
• while constructing my magazine I have learnt new skills on photoshop that I
was unfamiliar with in the past such as blending options and different
textures you could apply to text and layers. I also learned about different
lighting options that you could add to images to create different effects
which I experimented with in my own images, e.g. the back lighting I used
which helped to create the mysterious tone to my secondary images.
• Another new topic which I learned about were the different shot angles that
an image could be taken from to portray levels of power and dominance in
an image.
• Other devices and softwares which I used to create my blod were Dafont,
blogger, Imac, camera, prezi, slideshare, soundcloud and more. All of these
features have helped to make my blog more media rich.

7. Question 7- Looking back at your preliminary
task, what do you feel you have learned in the
progression from it to the full product.
• Looking back at my preliminary task I feel like my product has
improved in many ways such as improving the professionalism
of my work from researching existing conventions of
magazines and how real products use them successfully. This
has helped my work look more like an established product as it
has demonstrated the use of popular conventions.
• Another progression that I have made is the quality and content
of my images making sure they are relevant and interesting to
my images.