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

The conventions of a music magazine are just a set of guidelines that are to show anyone making a magazine what the normal layout is. For example every magazine has a masthead that tells you the name of the magazine, some other conventions include…

• Subheading
• Cover line
• A main image (possible 2^nd image) this normally takes up a majority of the page.
• Background colour
• bar code
• Possible freebees such as cd’s, posters, stickers etc.
• Price on the front.

The reason these conventions exist is because they are what the audience expect of a magazine, it’s what they’re use to reading, so they expect a nice bold masthead followed by an image and some cover line’s. However some magazines normally from the rock type genre tend to not follow conventions because they want to impose a sort of rebel image to attract different markets.

The type of magazine that I produced was typically aimed towards the heavy rock/metal market and when it came to the magazines I took my influence from it was mainly magazines such as metal hammer and a little bit of kerrang. After all that I believe that my magazine doesn't conform to the usual magazines out there because making a magazine that looks like every other magazine won't get you sales, it will just blend into the crowd and be ignored so I felt the best way to get the magazine noticed is to make is stand out, to do this I made it about heavy rock / metal music a genre of music that isn't followed to much by the mainstream these days. The only people who really follow it are a select group of people. I feel that my magazine challenges all the conventions of the modern day magazine because of the look, things such as the masthead are haggered and battered, and not a lot of things on my magazine are clean, by that I mean organized and well presented. All the information is in the right place and laid out well enough to read and follow but has a rough and rebellious feel to it and this adds to the magazines stand out ability.