Conventions analysis front cover & brief

Brief:

To design a front cover, contents and double page spread of a new music magazine. All images and text used must be original, a minimum of four images must be used.

Sky line also used as a plug. It is the first thing seen by the reader as the red colour stands out amongst the black main image.

Main image is black to suit the style of music it’s representing. The person in the main image is seen as attractive to the type of people that would read the magazine.

Feature story given a title in a different colour to stand out and show that it’s exclusive.

Main story is in white to fit the colour scheme with the black main image.

Footer is the same colour as the sky line to stand out and also shows the other stories feature in the magazine.

The media language of the magazine is to use the main colours associated with the metal genre which are red, black and white. This makes it stand out to people looking at it on the shelf and also the main image is used to attract the metal crowd, and in this case women in particular.

The ideology of the magazine is to show which artists in metal are popular at the time and to advertise them further. By doing this they can bring in fans of the artists to the magazine to read about what is currently happening gin terms of their favourite artist/artists.

Metal Hammer is a metal magazine published in the UK by a company called TeamRock. It focuses purely on the metal genre as well as sub-genres of metal. This means they don’t directly compete with rock magazines such as Kerrang as they focus on one genre in depth. TeamRock also focus on the rock genre but publish a magazine on metal to attract that specific crowd and focus on the talent in that genre.

The audience it focuses on is metal fans, both male and female however the majority of readers would be male. The magazine focuses on a specific audience so it wouldn’t attract many people from outside of that. This may limit their potential readers but this way more stories that this audience want to know about can be featured.

The metal crowd is represented by this magazine by the colour scheme it uses and what the person in the main image wears. Metal listeners are often seen as people who wear black, have long hair and tattoos. The person is represented in the main image in a way that he is seen as attractive by female readers. This is an example of the stereotypical metal listener.