Representation

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

My magazine is mainly aimed at the ‘indie’ counter-culture, but there are also quite a lot of ‘alternative’ content as these two groups are normally combined or thought of as the same thing. The age group that my magazine is trying to target is teenagers and young adults a roundabout 16-25 year olds. Also, it is targeted slightly more at males then females but I did incorporate ‘girly’ things into the magazine, such as including bands such as ‘The 1975’ that are very popular with girls.

When I first planned my magazine I thought that I was going to aim to aim it at quite a niche market as I wanted to only include indie and alternative music. But as I did some research I realized that I would reach a much larger target audience if I also include some punk music as well. But this worked well as the people who belong to the ‘indie; count-culture tend to listen to all three of these music genres.

The good thing about ‘Aesthetics’ magazine is it covers a wide variety of contents bands and music which means that it would appeal to quite a wide range of people and counter-cultures.

Thinking of demographics and psychographics into account; I needed to show this ever growing counter culture in terms of style, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. To the right is a picture of the band ‘Neck Deep’. They are a pop-punk band who is very popular at this moment in time in the ‘indie’ counter-culture. I tried to imitate their style with my models in my magazine, while incorporating the more traditional ‘indie’ style, like the band ‘Peace’ underneath. The reason that I didn’t have my models very traditionally indie looking was that I wanted to reach a wider audience and having the models look more neutral then made them look quite ‘alternative’ as well as ‘indie’, fitting into both groups nicely.

One of the main things about the ‘indie’ counter culture is that they want to stand out from the crowd and be different, thus being called ‘Indie’ which is short for individual. I tried to reflect this in my magazine by not complying to some of the normal conventions that most magazines. For example I didn't use any white space in my magazine and had all the pages with coloured backgrounds to make them look a bit different to the normal conventional magazine.