Magazine Research and Planning of Music Magazine

Today’s lesson was the analysis of music magazines and magazines as a money-making industry. As an introduction to the magazine industry we learnt that magazines are mostly part of a bigger institution and are usually owned by media moguls (e.g. Rupert Murdock) that own other fields of the media industry such as television channels, newspapers, record companies etc.

We then identified different magazines, their target audience and the genre they were. Then we evaluated a hip-hop music magazine cover and became familiar with magazine terminology (e.g. the masthead, strapline, banners and main image). We were then able to identify the target audience for this magazine and what aspects of the cover show that it is aimed at them.

In our groups our task was to identify the key features of a magazine cover and discuss the reasons for it (how it attracts the readers attention). The magazine cover that we were given was a Reading and Glastonbury special of 'NME' magazine. These are two popular indie/rock annual festivals and consistently sell-out. As this was a special edition of the magazine, most of the feature articles were based around this event leading to the magazine appealing to people who went to the festival. On the ‘right-third’ of the page was a list of celebrity musicians and the famous rock band ‘Metallica’ was the boldest and biggest name of the this implying that this magazine is mostly aimed at rock fans.

The main image of the magazine is a man singing into a microphone with is mouth wide open, he is young and has big ‘unruly’ hair and looks like a stereotypical ‘rock-star’. He looks as though he is singing live and the image was taken at a performance, this implies that he is a well known artist and was a headline act in one of the festivals also attracting the reader’s attention because they may be interested in the festival because of they like the artists that performed there.

Our final task was to plan our own magazine cover and prepare for a photo shoot in the following lesson. Firstly we chose a genre of music and decided that the classical music media that we have seen is mostly aimed at a niche audience ( middle-aged people) so we wanted to create a unique magazine but keep within the main codes and convention of ‘typical’ music magazines (e.g. freebies, graphics and feature articles).

The title of our magazine is ‘Classique’ to resemble the words ‘class’ and the sounding of the word ‘chic’. This was too appeal to both teenagers and young adults (ages 14-25) with he words ‘Class’ attracting young adults and ‘Sique’ the teenagers. Our slogan is ‘CLASS + KOOL = CLASSICALKOOL’. This is aimed at teenagers because the word ‘kool’ is spelt in slang and is similar to the word classical but instead it can be seen as a ‘modern’ and ‘trendy’ version of the word.

We then planned what images that we wanted to put on the cover and decided to take three images. As we were a group of four and wanted our magazine to target both the young and old audience, two group members dressed in young ‘trendy’ clothes and the other two members were styled as mature, smart but yet stylish and sophisticated. Our third image would be of all four of us promoting a classical CD as this would make a feature article and interest the reader because it would be two young members and two adult members forming one classical band. We shot all images inside of the college but used photo editing to remove the background and add our own. It was important that the images highlighted the difference between the younger and older people in the main image.