Evaluation Question 2

How does my media product represent particular social groups?

The main demographic for my magazine is mainly in the E demographic, that are in the psycho-graphic of explorers and reformers. This is because mostly teens and young adults, aged around 16-30, who are experiencing the new music the smaller musicians have to offer and the audience would have to be willing to give lesser known musicians a go and also have knowledge of good taste to determine whether they believe the talent is worth listening to. The demographic is also for ‘trend setters’ and ‘hipsters’. This is because it focuses on new music that not many people would have heard of, and therefore isn’t mainstream.

Since these demographics usually are represented with a more relaxed and unprofessional tone I decided to make the magazine a more professional tone as I wanted to challenge the stereotypes, this also creates a talking point about the magazine.

A clear way that I have accessed these demographics is through the topic itself. These demographics typically spend a lot of time each day purely devoted to searching through the internet. A lot of these demographics also tend to listen to music as they search or they search specifically for music, therefore it makes sense to have a magazine focused on internet music.

Having the main focus on the cover be focused on a teen musician, this suggests that the teen demographic is capable and possibly hardworking. I have also tried to use the text to show that teens are dedicated to the work, having the feature focus mainly around the music and not ‘gossip’ topics such as relationships. The teen in the photo is also wearing casual clothes, but none of the clothes are worn or ripped,  this is done to show that the younger demographic (16-25) can still remain casual in their work, whereas the older demographics (26-30) will hopefully be reading this to gather ideas or possibly take up new talent. This demographic itself isn't represented as well as it could have been in the magazine. I think this as having an article on the cover related to finding or producing the talent would help give more access to the older demographic. In most media recently, teens are usually depicted as being lazy or disruptive and the 20-30 ages are shown as an age of professionalism, I believe that the magazine challenges that.

To continue giving the younger demographic a professional appeal, I decided to leave out any cover lines or topics that could be seen as gossip or unrelated information. For example, already famous musicians and the mentioned relationship topics. This is because someone reading this magazine should be reading for the new talent, having the usual topics that the more gossipy magazine have would detract from it. This could in turn reflect that the audience is unwilling to listen to the new music.

It is usually easy to recognize someone that spends a large amount of time listening to music, as they usually have some sort of headphone within reach, however it can be a lot harder to identify someone that spends a lot of time on the internet – mainly because that is the majority of people. On top of this, because a large amount of musicians online participate in almost every genre, and some mixed, it can be hard to represent everyone. To achieve this I used colours that can easily represent a large audience, reds can be interpreted as passion and love, whereas it can also be interpreted as anger and rebellion. This single colour can tap into multiple genres, like the ‘rebellious’ heavy metal or the ‘romantic’ era of western classical music.