Question 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

When thinking about how my media products represents specific social groups, I must think about my initial TA (Target Audience) . I outlined who I felt to be my TA early on within my blog; I described my TA to be someone who is in their late teens to early twenties, who are in a new band or trying to start a new band. This TA I feel is a niche and in order to appeal to them I have stuck with a theme that I feel suits that age range at the moment. I have done this using bold colours all the way through my magazine, as my house style only using the colours blue, red, white and black. I feel by using simple bold simple colours I am appealing to my TA, this is because I am following the conventions of Q magazine, as they are trying to appeal to the same age range as I am. I am using the same conventions as Q not in the sense that I am using their colour scheme, instead I am attempting to follow their use of clean lines with contrasting bold colours. 

My magazine however contrasts Q magazine in other ways, for instance: my magazine is supporting the theme of rock bands. Q simply follows popular culture, so in order to make that difference clear I have used things such as rugged fonts where the text looks ripped apart or jagged. My colour scheme is also darker than that of Q (but still clean and well cut) which would connote to the reader the genre of "rock" as darker colour schemes would be found in music magazines such as karrang.

Another way that I have enabled my music magazine to appeal to my social group was to have my band for the magazine playing their instruments within their studio, by seeing the guitars and the drums anyone that saw the magazine would instantly recognise that it would be of the rock genre and if my TA was to see it on the shelf of a newsagents or supermarket would know that it was a rock magazine and would then pick it up and buy it as it would appeal to them.

My TA however was not just young people who liked rock music, I also said that it was people in up and coming bands, so in order to support this side of my TA I have used my magazines masthead  along with the headers on the front of the page. When you looked at my magazine you would see that it was called “UPRISING” I have intentionally called it this so that it connotes not only rock music as it gives off the sense of rebellion that rock music will often support, but also it connotes up and coming bands, which is the TA for my music magazine. The headers also support my TA as one of them says “getting signed”. Anyone from my TA that is in a band will see this and be intrigued as they themselves would want to themselves and their band to be signed, so this would lure them into buying the magazine in order to read the article.