Music Magazine: Research and Planning, Task Five

The representation of people in indie-pop music magazine

I will be discussing the representation of both the musicians and the fans/readers. I will be focusing on mise-en-scene used in the cover images and photos used in double page spreads. This will demonstrate that I understand how magazines encode representations and this will then be evident in my photography for my music magazine cover.

In this front cover of "Under the radar", we can see that the famous musician - Grimes, is looking sideways with no eye contacts with readers at all with the back of her hand holding against her face. It seems as if she is lifting her face up gracefully, suggesting she is delicately to be looked at by the readers and that she is at a higher status with achievements unlike the general public. The touch of cold tones have been edited onto the front cover, the pink, purple, blue and white makes up a fantasy colour scheme. Along with the nicely fitted dress Grimes is wearing, it visualise her as a goddess who is unreachable by fans and the readers. The lacey dress she is wear is actually a very trendy at the moment, which we can say the same with her music as they're very popular right now, this relates to the audience because they will see the fashionable garments Grimes is wearing and likely to try and find something in stores in order to match with Grimes as fans tends to mimic their idols. By placing her in the middle of the magazine front cover, it clearly shows that Grimes is the main attention, reinforced by the cover line of "Post internet superstar". The background of the image is plain therefore it will not distract the audience from Grimes, the plain background also allows area for the taglines and other details. As for the audience, due to the pink and purple tones that can be seen on the cover, I believe that it is aimed at female as it's associated with those colours. From this cover, the readers are represented as faithful followers of Grimes the goddess, for which they will agree with the magazine that Grimes is the "Best of 2012". Furthermore, the uniformed font of the cover suggests that the readers like to be simple and be straightforward with life, as it is shown that the taglines are very simply listed.

There is only one photo in this double page spread from Spin magazine, which the article is about Florence and the machine. This one photo of Florence takes up over half of the double page spread, which allows the readers to clearly see who she is and admire her beauty. Even though "Florence and the machine" is the name of a band that Florence is in, she still have the main attention and the photo only features her because she is the lead singer in the indie-rock band who is the most important member. The way Florence is looking into the camera is difficult to deceive, but it can be diverted into two idea, first is that she is looking into the camera with despair due to the lack of  positive emotion shown. The second idea is that she is staring into the camera with confidence, I believe it's the latter idea because Florence and the machine is so successful that there's no way she has a lack of confidence. Florence is clearly seen as connecting to her fans/readers through the eye contact, which will make the readers feel like they personally know about her after reading this article about her. The colour scheme for the entire double page spread is monotone without a hint of hues. This suggests that Florence is modern which means her music is contemporary and that her fans are young and fresh and energetic.