Music Magazine - Research Summary

From my research of music magazines I have learnt many things. Firstly, I have learnt on the front cover of a magazine it is always better to make your subject have eye contact with the camera and therefore the audience. This is so that it will catch the audience’s eyes and they are more likely to pick the issue up. Also, on many music magazines such as Kerrang! And NME, display their main feature image, which is on the front cover, over the logo, giving the impression that the artist, is more important than the brand. I have found that a lot of people in the magazine industry use fun fonts and bright colours to make the pages interesting, however also keeping to a colour scheme and style.

Through looking at all the different music magazines I have come to decide that I want to make a rock style magazine. For these types of magazines, they usually have a series of rock colours, these are mostly black, white, red and yellow. Also, I researched what kinds of clothes people tend to wear in the rock style and found that leather jackets, ripped jeans, netted tights, laced tights, printed t-shirts, DrMartins’s, converse, leather trousers and a lot of black is very common. The props used are normally microphones, guitars, drums, and other instruments as well as props that reflect the text. The make-up that they normally wear in the magazines for women is dark and almost gothic whereas men normally have very subtle just to hide blemishes. Rock music magazines typically put a lot of posters in each issue to attract a female audience.

I have found that the for a rock target audience unisex, this is because they use things such as posters, fun fonts, sob stories, fashion, posed pictures and bright colours to attract a female audience, whereas they use dark colours, competitions, easy read articles with pictures and feedback. For unisex they have; band alerts, album releases, hot news, live reviews, concert pictures and band merchandise adverts. From this I have realised I want to make a more female orientated magazine but also includes come manly things.

In the main features they usually use box outs which are boxes on the side used for quick reading of the article. These are sometimes filled with silly questions to attract the audience and make it more personal. In the features they use a lot quotes to make the text interesting and the tones of the writing always reflect the pictures they go with. The mood can change the whole view on the story which is where the target audience come in, so you have to make sure that you have the right tone and mood for the reader to keep interest. Sometimes, they use different colours to break up the text to make look fun and the fonts always have to be different for the main writing and the box outs.

This research has helped me to plan and design my own magazine and to make it for the right audience as well as making interesting.