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

Conventions are features which you would find on every single magazine cover, no matter what genre or where in the world you find it. For example, all magazines would have a main header, this is regardless whether it would be ‘Top of the Pops’ or ‘Kerrang’, both have stereotypical main headers for their magazine genres. Conventions are used on magazine covers to attract the audience; by this I mean one typical convention of magazines is to have a large image on the front of the cover. This would entice the audience in and attract them to buy the magazine, which at the end of the day is the whole point of magazines, to sell them. Other conventions which are used would be a barcode, dateline, cover line, master head and a layout. Obviously, all magazines greatly vary when looking into more detail into these conventions. For example, ‘Kerrang’ wouldn’t have an image of Britney Spears on the front of the cover, as she isn’t the type of music genre which the audience are interested in; yet, ‘Top of the Pops’ would gladly have an image of Britney Spears as it would appeal to the readers. The magazines would have different colours, graphics and layouts depending on the kind of audience they would wish to attract.

The genre of magazine I choose to produce was a glossy Indie style. I choose to do this because it is the kind of music I am interested in. I took a lot of influence from NME and Q Magazine. I looked at lot at NME because I liked the modern sophisticated style of the magazine. I also looked at Q magazine because I liked the fact it still focused on other topics while having its main topic as music. It also looked at other things liked lifestyle and photography, this very much appealed to me and I thought it would to my audience as well so I tried to take as much inspiration from these as possible.