In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

I decided that my front cover should in fact adhere to a lot of music magazine conventions. Conventions such as having a big masthead, a plug in on the front cover, having the most important cover lines on the front cover and having an image of the featured artist on the front cover all add up to make a well thought music magazine cover because it allows the audience immediately realise that the magazine is a music magazine, the photo I have used is a direct address image because the artist is looking at the . I chose to follow these conventions because other magazines such as Vibe, Q, NME and other mainstream magazines generally follow these conventions and have done quite well in the magazine industry, so following these examples allowed me to make the decision that i want my magazine to be recognised as a music magazine which from some brief feedback was successful.

Although for the front cover i had chosen to follow the conventions of music magazine, i had decided to challenge the conventions of music magazines for my contents page. Instead i decided to follow the conventions of my music genre and base it around the iconography of the dubstep genre. I had decided to call my contents page a playlist and not a contents page because by doing so, it would immediately have an impact on the audience because it has challenged the conventions of music magazines. By doing so I have built up some form of brand identity and by including the UKF logo it increases the iconography of the music genre which is good. The ideology of the dubstep genre is basically about technical equipment being used a lot and I have adhered to the ideology of the music genre. The sound bars in the background also link into the genre of the music but don't really follow the conventions of other music magazines.

For my double page spread I wanted to adhere to the conventions of other music magazines as well as challenge it at the same time. So i decided to base my double page spread around the conventions of music magazines but almost adapt those conventions to suit my music genre. By that i mean i had taken photos of the artist in a way that would probably only be acceptable to use in a dubstep magazine and the editing wasnt so complex. This shows how i have followed the conventions of not over editing the image of the artist but the shot type i have adapted to fit in with my music magazine. Also the layout is quite conventional too, by having the artist cover the majority of the left side of the two pages i was able to concentrate the text on the right side of the magazine which allowed me to make it a little more text heavy than i planned which is good because then it may get more readers interested in the magazine on the whole. Although it seems like i have followed a few conventions, i havn't included a box out on my double page spread which is generally used in a lot of other magazines, instead i have just included the twitter name and facebook page at the bottom of the right hand page, which in a way is both conventional for some magazines but unconventional for other magazines.