Research and Planning: 8. Concept, Treatment and Evaluation

Concept
The title is Elec; it’s short and rolls off the tongue. It connotes to energy and outlines the genre that the magazine is based around. The previous title was simply DnB, but it was changed since Electronica was a better range of music that I like to listen to so the name covered the wrong range and it sounds way too generic anyway.
This magazine deals with Electronica bands such as The Prodigy and Pendulum as well as our own band. It also deals with music software such as Reason and Record, and synthesisers such as the MiniMogue and their history with Roland the first synthesiser maker. It focuses around the genres of Drum and Bass, Dubstep, Techno and Trance. It can also relate to earlier genres of computer music such as keygens and chiptunes.

It’s Purpose and Aims is to catch the interest of Electronica fans and give information about the Electronica music sub-culture, artists and cheap/free music software to encourage people considering a career in electronic music.
It’s aimed at bright 16 year old males and females who are less interested in mainstream pop music and more interested in certain bands such as The Prodigy and Pendulum, and other artists featured on the UKFDrumAndBass YouTube channel such as Netsky and ShockOne, or new Electronica artists starting their career.

Treatment
The cover page will feature a picture of the band Plutopia as the dominant image. There will be a few articles mentioning the band as well as Top 10s of Electronica, Drum and Bass and Trance etc and articles on cool cheap/free music software for music artists. It will include a flash because they are an effective eye-catching feature.

The contents page will look like Windows Media Player listing the articles like tracks. If there is space in the text there will be small thumbnails of things to the right of the text relating to an article such as the band Plutopia.
The double page spread will feature a review of Plutopia with a stripe going across a point just above the middle page showing a close up of the three members close to each other. Text will be below in solid columns with a few pictures amongst the text.
The tone is laid-back and informal to appeal to 16 year olds. The language will be simple enough but won’t seem like it’s patronising by being too simple. The text and images will be somewhat scattered and not in a regular arrangement, but not completely, to present an interesting Kerrang!-like layout to the viewer without it being too hard to navigate the page layouts.

Justification
I have arranged the magazine’s format to something similar to Kerrang! That is an interesting and unusual format having unorganised layouts and large images with colourful borders. It breaks the convention of how text is written on paper as straight and organised in rows and columns. The text will be randomly spaced out and slightly tilted to present an interesting and different layout to read.
This magazine will appeal to its target audience because its content will be very similar to a magazine such as Kerrang! but will focus on a musical sub-culture that mainstream musical magazines tend to overlook. The people who write music of the target genre are widespread throughout the Internet, so giving certain obscure artists some lime light will mean that the target audience can check out new artists to satisfy a need for more variety in their music library.
The challenges I may face in production may include emulating the style of a music magazine as I have not seen many. I will need to make sure I do enough research to be able to include enough content and pay attention to detail.