Audience portfolio

Contrasting my draft and final product

Masthead research and research planning

Post production: Feedback

The post production was to ask peers what they thought of my front cover, contents page and double page spread. In future, if I ever did a project like this then I would try to improve the weaknesses that my peers picked out such as the fact that I should change my masthead's colour to make it more unique. Another thing that I may do in the future is try and find a more suitable location to take the shoot as I feel the backgrounds of the images did not connote much for the reader. In addition, I would try and do more surveys and get it to more people to see what the general view of the area is about music. I also had the colours for my title changed in the contents and the double page spread as the original colours did not go well with the background and black was also a popular colour in the questionnaire.

Other music magazine photos and why I did not use them

Question 1: In what ways does your media product develop or challenge forms of conventions of real media products?

Music Magazine Questionnaire

I believe in the idea of preliminary research so it can allow me to see who my target audience are and what kind of preferences they prefer in a music magazine and for that purpose a music magazine questionnaire was created. This music magazine was created and distributed to various people in my college as well as outside my college. Underneath are the results I managed to accumulate from the participants and through the use of Microsoft Excel I put it into graphs.
The first question I asked was about their age. This was a question I felt needed to be asked as it allowed me to first of identify  who the target audience/consumers are as well as giving me time to research what that age group was into to help my magazine. The results showed my target audience is between the ages of 16-18.
The second question was also needed to let me know what type of genres the different age groups liked and it allowed me to assess what kind of genre I wanted to make my music magazine be based on. Thus, the results suggest that I should be focusing on the genre of ‘Indie’ in my music magazine.
For my third question I asked what price ranges the audience would be willing to buy a music magazine for. This allowed me to formulate ideas of what my music magazine price should be as well and the results show that it should be in between the range of £1.00-£2.00.
For my fourth question, I asked who were their favourite artists. This allowed me to get a grasp of what genre these artists were and helped me in constructing the music magazine. It would seem that the band ‘2 Door Cinema Club’ are favourites of those who participated and so they should be in the music magazine in one form or another.
My fifth question helped me to understand how often the participants read a music magazine. The results helped me get a sense of how many readers read ‘X’ amount of music magazines and so allowed me to plan how often I should distribute the magazine.
For my sixth question, I asked the participants what kind of colours they would like to see in a music magazine. The most common answers were the colours white, black and peach. This allowed to see what colours would be popular among the age group and therefore meaning that I should use these colours.
My seventh question was asked to see if there was a point of adding some kind of notice of competitions or something similar. The results show that the majority would participate in such competitions and so this may help boost readership.
My eighth question was to see what the participants views were of how often I should distribute the music magazine. The results suggest I should distribute it weekly and this would again help boost readership.   

This also helped me to start thinking about the social groups that this magazine is aimed at as most music magazines have a social group that they are aiming at. The ideology of this could be to try and incorporate various interests of that social group. One can also connote there may be a certain professionalism as the questionnaire seems to be professional.