How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Through my research and reader survey, I found that my readership were about male 1:2 female, slightly above average wealth and liked Bands:

The first thing I noticed was that almost double the amount of females took the survey then males, this showed me I should be aiming a lot of the content of the magazine towards females, but have contact that males can also connect with as a third of the readership would be males.

In order to achieve this, I created a 3 member band, with both male and female artists. I had the female as the lead singer - promoting a strong female connotation that young women (see age section bellow) could relate to. The band was based off the popular Punk Rock band Paramore (see Band section).

Over half of the people that took the survey were 16, with none under 15, and a few 17, 18, 19 etc. respondents. This shows that I need to aim the content at people that are older teenagers, and feature issues and situations that older teenagers may find themselves in. In order to fully captivate my audience I will need to  have content that appeals to them, some ideas could be (but not limited to):

- More mature music (rap etc.)

- Artists talking about when they were teenagers

- Free concert tickets
- Fashion in the Music Industry
- Information on Tours

I used this information to tailor the content of the magazine around a younger adult audience. I used the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test to make sure the wording of the magazine was easily readable for the age group, and I also picked topics to write about that more mature teenagers would be interested in to make my magazine seem more desirable.

I used the demographic information from my survey to know what social group to represent. The group was slightly older, middle class, white teenagers.

The average income for a British family with two adults working is £40,000 a year (Source). The average (midpoint mean) of the respondents of the survey is £55,000, which is £15,000 above average. This shows that the readership would have, on average, more disposable income than the average population, meaning that advertisers of normal (as a pose to inferior) products would be interested in advertising in the magazine, and also the readers would probably be better educated and higher up in Socio Economic Grouping (ABC1)

100% of the responders told us who their favourite artists were, showing that they're passionate and loyal to their favourites. I put the results into a spreadsheet, and through the use of a scoring system and algorithm I ordered the submitted bands and artists in order of popularity amongst my responders. 

The scoring system works by multiplying the frequency of people that picked the artist by a number, the number changes depending on weather the people chose the artist as their number one favourite, or second favourite and so on.

- If someone chose artist x as their 5th favourite, the artist would get 1 point. 

- If someone chose artist x as their 4th favourite, the artist would get 2 points. 

- If someone chose artist x as their 3rd favourite, the artist would get 4 points. 

- If someone chose artist x as their 2nd favourite, the artist would get 7 points. 

- If someone chose artist x as their 1st favourite, the artist would get 11 points.

The scores go up by 1 (between 5th and 4th) and then by 2 (between 4th and 3rd) then 3 (between 3rd and 2nd) and then 4 (between 2nd and 3rd).

I put the results into a web page so that they could be displayed on my blog:

To see the spreadsheet in full size, or if it isn't displayed above, please click here. Take the time to look at it.

As you can see by the spreadsheet, on average people's top 5 favourite artists/bands were:

• Arctic Monkeys (Indie Rock / Post-Punk Revival)
• Bring Me The Horizon (Metal Core / Punk)
• Vaccines (Indie Rock)
• Oasis (Rock / Brit Pop)
• Halsey (Electro Pop / Indie Pop)

So looking at the genres of people's favourite music, Rock came up three times, so did Indie and Punk came up twice, so I will base my magazine on one (or more) of these three genres in order to attract the majority of the readership to my magazine. A magazine that features these best is probably Kerrang, which as shown in Question 5, is the second most popular magazine amongst my respondents, followed by NME, which features these genres in it's magazine (but does not specialise in them). 

In terms of gender, the top bands/artists are predominantly male - but in my magazine I'd like to have a mixture of all of the top 5 artists in order to appeal to the most potential readers. I asked 20 of my friends (10 boys and 10 girls) if they saw two magazines, one with a female rock/indie/punk artist and one with a male rock/indie/punk artist on the front, here were the responses:

Artist    Gender	Male             Responses	Female             Responses	Total
Female Artist	4	3	7	35%
Male Artist	6	7	13	65%

So, as you can see by the responses of this sub survey showed that the overall possible readership would prefer a female artist on the front of the magazine, which interestingly juxtaposes with the favorite artists, this could be because of an array of different reasons, like sex appeal for men and women relating to the female artists.

From the information I got from this mini-survey, I'm going to probably have a female artist on the front cover of my magazine.

After doing the research, I know I wanted to do a Punk Rock band.

Existing Punk Rock Bands

Green Day, Rise Against, My Chemical Romance, Blink 182 and Paramore are all examples of punk rock bands.

Here's some pictures of 5 popular Punk bands. You can tell they're Punk artists because of the clothing they're wearing. They often wear black clothes or clothing with very little colour. They usually have quite serious facial expressions. Paramore's (bottom right) lead singer goes against both of these popular conventions, in this picture you can see she is smiling - which isn't usual in a punk band picture, and she also has bright hair. Unlike pop bands, Punk bands often look more scruffy, with bland clothing and untidy hair. Although Photoshop is almost definitely used on the images, it is not as drastic as its use on pop bands. Very little makeup is used, but sometimes the men have slight black eyeliner and skin whitening foundation like My Chemical Romance.

Clothing

The use of black clothing is more apparent in modern Punk bands, older bands would wear black with vibrant colours. But the all black is now the norm

I wanted my band to wear all black none branded clothing to represent the genre, as it is conventional for the band members to wear all black, usually just a regular black T-shirt and black skinny jeans. I found pictures online of different articles of clothing and photoshopped them into one band picture, and then I shot the picture, and edited it to look a similar style as other band pictures in the Punk Rock Genre. Here's the process:

I've decided to have my models wear all black in the front cover. I wanted one of the guys in the back to have a leather jacket on as well. This is the type of clothing that people that listen to the Pop Punk music genre would wear. I chose Jack as one of my models because he has a stretcher and a very 'scene' look. 'Scene kids' love this sort of music genre so I consulted with Jack on what sort of clothing my models should wear. Here is how I want it to look, I hadn't chosen all of my models when I made this mock up so I made their heads the heads of my favourite animals, this is a convention in high street fashion (see more here):

Here's the photoshop 'Google Mock up' version of how I wanted my models to be dressed.

Here's the photo we actually got

Here's the video of me editing the photo I got to make it look more like what I wanted. I edited the faces and hair of the models, and I also made their clothing look more like what I had planned, I did this by removing tshirt graphics, and also changing the colour of one of the model's jeans from blue to black.