Music MagazineZachary Snow

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

Conventions of Music Magazines

There already is a wide range of conventions established within the music magazine institution. Many of the conventions apply generally to industry or a genre within the A lot them apply to a genre or representation group and so conventions can differ widely between two magazines. For this part of the evaluation I’m going be comparing and contrasting with NME and Ray Gun. Both of which, have established, followed and progressed conventions within the direct area Rock magazines.

Quick history each magazine NME: New Music Express is a British music

magazine first published in 1951. As the name suggest, the magazine was created to follow the genres of popular music developing within the music industry.

Ray Gun: Ray Gun is an American music magazine first published in 1992 and discontinued in 2000. The magazine was used a typographical convention destroyer, the magazine was more of a piece of art than a readable text.

“The Musically Alternative” As a title

The title “The Musically Alternative” for my magazine came from pure thought, with no design conventions in mind, but maybe emphasis of being an “individual” within alternative rock. The title itself is meant to be taken ironically/sarcastically and is very much a comment on two elements of the music industry. Firstly, in a non-sarcastic way, calling my magazine “The Musically Alternative” puts a clear label on my magazine as not being about popular culture/music, alienating an audience who I weren’t targeting. Secondly, in a sarcastic way, it’s a comment on the meme of how people in the rock music industry try to define themselves as idiosyncratic when they’re clearly following conventions. So in many ways I’m being iconoclastic, trying to sarcastically destroy/progress conventions.

The shorten version of title, TMA, took direct influence from NME. After I thought of the title and realized it was too long, I simply shorten it. Doing this meant I was followed established conventions of the industry, although concept of acronyms weren’t invented by the New Music Express.The title appeals to my target audiences – So it works. The irony of title might be lost on some people.

House Style

For the design of my magazine I create some house-style/design rules to follow. Based partly on conventions, and on elements that worked in some of my experiments for this project and past projects I’ve done. The design rules can be seen here: House Style Rules Creating a design model allowed my work on the magazine to be consistent, even though I went against my own rules sometimes. The rules are pretty much blanket statements, that are too vague to go directly with/against conventions. The colour rule, expressive purple with contrasting black-and-white, is a good example of rule what has enough context to challenge conventions. Magazines such as NME and Ray Gun have the freedom to use any colour, but as I’m a very visual person (in terms of pure colours) I wanted my magazine to have a clear colour scheme. Black-and-white representing the plainness and directness of tone in the magazine. With the purple representing the expressive side and not so direct sarcasm used. This in many way just plainly ignored convention, as I created/”made up” a design rule which didn’t have much background in other music magazines. One way I directly went against print convention is how I made the dimensions 1:1, and not A series ratios. I did this purely to make designing my magazine simpler digitally. The images I used also in many ways went against convention. I almost completely ignored the concept/convention of characterisation within media, by not including images of people. I did this because the ideology (my ideology, ideology of my direct target audience) is going against the whole hyperreal status given to people (Pop stars being compared to jesus, ect.). Images are key to the hyperreal status. So I took picture how the artists point-of-view. The feature of that issue of my magazine is about “Zachary”, and the picture on front cover is my second favorite spot in kettering. This also applies to content page image (a photo of my bag) and the inside the piano (I play time to time) image on double page spread. This is not a direct personalization of that issue of the magazine, but more pictures related to music given slightly more contexts.

Layout

The layout out of my magazine didn’t really go against conventions. Although it followed simply design conventions on the front cover: the title being at top of the page, barcode in corner of the page and sub-title in more-or-less the center page. All these are basic typographic magazine design conventions that followed, but also in ways progressive by taking a step more in simpler. In other words, these conventions are used to tell the reader what the magazine about, I simplified this by only putting basic information on cover magazine. This is similar what Ray Gun has done (can be seen next side).

TMA and Ray Gun

Interview challenging conventions

The way I written my interview challenged many interview/texts conventions. Many magazines use a simple question and answer format when interviewing artists, which have no personality at the slightest. I challenged this by making my double page spread interview more a monological recount of speaking to an artist. This was done by recalling a question, stating the artist answer then giving out-of-quote contextual feedback. Over all giving a lot more information to the reader without making it any more complex then question and answer format. With added peak how giving more personal arty feel.