In this project what I am creating is going to be a music magazine and the style of genre that I am most likely going to be using is Hip Hop. The way in which I will make my magazine a success is by following conventions of a Hip Hop music magazine that is successful such as ‘The Source’. I will also have to look at good fonts and colour that will bring out the image that I will use to make the front cover of my music magazine. The types of skills that I have is a good level of photography skills and also an extensive use of Photoshop that will help me manipulate and adjust my images that I would take pictures of and these two items will help a great deal whilst making my music magazine.
What I will need to find out will be conventions of other successful Hip Hop music magazines because this will help me understand the actual field behind what you would see and if I do this it will help make my written work easier as well as my practical because then I have an understanding of the field. I will have to do research in radial analysis, denotations and connotations of the genre magazines and this will help a lot because then I am making an understanding of the genre myself with my own opinions and this will help me design my own magazine in a unique way that will help me stay away from plagiarism and making my magazine very un-similar to others. Also I will do questionnaires and hand them out to people so that I can get an understanding to what they would like in the magazine so that when published the magazine would sell and not just die out.
Also, secondary research will help because I can research audience theories and this will help me understand the media industry and also give me an understanding as in how other publishers of magazines start and how they construct there magazines.
AUDIENCE THEORIES
There are many audience theories however there is a fast moving pace in media technology and the audience to a certain extent can be outdated due to the media is moving quickly and the audience are becoming the producers such as the rises of YouTube and MySpace, this is called the ‘Democratisation of Media’. There is however four main types of Audience Theories and one of these are called the ‘Hypodermic Needle Model’. This is from around the 1920’s to get the mass audience to understand about mass media. This is to give people the understanding that we are indirectly brainwashed by information fed to us by the creators of media texts. Such as Hip Hop in 2000 and comics in the 1950’s, they believe that it will make you react and do certain things that have been influenced by the Media. A good example to this is the Propaganda posters that had helped with the morale of the country when they were in War. Also, the way in which I will use this in my magazine is with the text and the way my images will be presented it will show a certain style you need to have and the way the text is wrote and said will have an impact on the audience and make them feel more Hip Hop and understand the culture after reading the magazine and this may also indirectly make them feel a bit more Hip Hop you could say.
CASE STUDY ON XXL HIP HOP MAGAZINE
XXL is a Hip Hop magazine. It was founded by Jules Winnfield who was also an ex-worker of The Source magazine. This magazine was created so that there is another magazine better than The Source since people believed rapper Benzino and David Mays were influencing the editorial content and rating system. Elliot Wilson and Datwon Thomas are editors of the magazine who previously worked for other Hip Hop magazines such as The King.
The ethos of XXL magazine is to target a Hip Hop magazine for young people who are into this style of music and they also try to target the magazine at people that come from a certain background, class and even the style of music they are in to. This magazine has an ethos of making sure that this magazine will become better or even is better than competitor and famous Hip Hop magazine The Source. They also believe that this magazine should show a true judgement of rappers and artists to show their true side leaving the media perspective point of view.
The representation of this magazine is shown in the way in which the pictures are taken from the angle as well as the way the text is structured, events or even general objects. In this magazine they are shown by the colour that they would use such as red and blue which is gang affiliated and then orange of prison clothes then white and black. They also show it in what they would wear and plenty of jewellery that is called ‘Bling’. They have this when they have images of artists in the front cover such as Lil Wayne, Eminem and even Cam’ron.
The target audience of the magazine XXL is mainly pointed at males between the ages from around 14-27 years old. This can be argued because most of the pictures on the front cover are males however some of the topics inside the magazine can be seen sexist and by certain points of views by rap stars towards women. Also when they have things on Black History shows they are trying to bring in some sort of education and also when they have things on President Obama it show politics which can show that they are trying to cover more than what it just seems so that it can broaden the amount of people actually buying these magazines.
The roles within this magazine are editing, publishing, models, photographers, interviewers, graphic designers, paste-up artists, illustrator and even a photojournalist. These are all vital because they all play a role in which to make a magazine from the information within the magazine to the layout and all the different colours and images that you would see inside of it.
This magazine has had a big history since it had came out in 1997 and has been owned over by Harris Publications that also owns other magazines such as ‘Scratch’ magazine. They also have ex-workers/editors that have come from other successful Hip Hop magazine such as ‘King’ and ‘The Source’. In December 2006, had taken over the Hip Hop DJ/Producer magazine called ‘Scratch’ this was then re-branded as ‘XXL Presents Scratch Magazine’ however this was shut down in September 2007. Also, now they have other titles with limited runs under the names of XXL such as the Shade45, Eye-Candy and Hip Hop Soul magazine.
