QUESTION 4- HOW DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT REPRESENT PARTICULAR SOCIAL GROUPS?

By Laura Simmons

TARGET AUDIENCE

• The target audience for my magazine is teenagers and young adults around the age range of 15-23 who enjoy indie and alternative music with a unique sound.

• I decided this because my questionnaire results show that most people who are in the age range I specified prefer alternative indie music, and it is something I enjoy too which makes it more pleasurable to create meaning I will most likely make it look more desirable to the target audience if I can understand their point of view well.

GENRE ASSOCIATIONS

• When I chose the genre ‘indie’ to explore for my music magazine, my instant personal interpretation of this was the idea of festivals, because indie artists are normally associated with playing amazing live events from small intimate gigs to international festivals.

• And with the idea of festivals, I automatically associated this with summer. As this is more of a nostalgic approach to the idea, I recreated the reality of the genre by using natural images where my model is in an exterior setting in a muddy field similar to a festival environment to connote the idea of summer and festivals.

WHAT SOCIAL GROUPS DOES MY MAGAZINE REPRESENT?

• My magazine represents a variety of different social groups, such as young females as the girl on the front cover’s main image may influence their fashion style, especially any people who’re enjoy indie/ alternative music.

• Males who enjoy /indie/alternative music are represented through the genre because most of the artists that are mentioned on my magazine cover have the stereotypical fan base of ‘indies’ and ‘rockers’ with longhair, who wear checked tops or big denim jackets or males who have facial hair or hair styles in general similar to the bands, as the bands are their influences.

REPRESENTATIONS…

• On the front cover and contents, my artists are represented as quite moody, and have serious looking poses and facial expressions. The serious facial expressions could represent their style of music and how serious/important their music is to them.

• They’re represented as quite fashionable and mature. In a fan’s point of view, this would be seen as positive because it is the style they’re interested in and these people could be their role models or who they look up to.

GENRE REPRESENTATIONS…

• On the contents page there is a picture of my main cover artist ‘in action’, playing instruments. This would interest social groups that like playing instruments themselves or fans who are a growing band and general fans who want to know what instruments the different band member’s play.

• She looks happy, relaxed and lively, giving a very positive representation. They look quite different to the more serious, posed pictures. The poses show that stereotypes can be miss-read as when they are posing for pictures and wearing certain styles of fashion, they seem quite intimidating and negatively portrayed as aggressive whereas, how they actually are naturally is quite happy, alive and not meaning to be intimidating at all.

• This challenges stereotypes of teens/young adults as they are usually portrayed in the media as being anti-social.