Music Magazine Research

Recently just bought two music magazines to help me create my own one, picked up Kerrang! and NME, both of which come from a similar music genre to my aim. It also meant I got the chance to see what other music magazines were popular.

In the next couple of days I am going to analyse a double page spread from one of the two magazines, perhaps Kerrang!'s double page spread on 'You Me At Six' (www.myspace.com/youmeatsix)

I also found it quite interesting to actually buy a copy of NME as I have never done so before and as I recently analysed it in a case study and having read about the history of NME it is clear that it has developed from the broad audienced version in 1952 to todays copies. Before I also didn't realise that NME was an acronym of 'New Musical Express'. Interesting!

I also did a case study on Smash Hits! which has been discontinued, I am only going to post a snapshot of my case studies in which I explain how they have helped me for my decisions for my music magazine...

NME: "This case study has helped me consider what genre of music I am going to aim for and realise it needs to be quite specific as a broad ranged magazine wouldn’t be popular and it has backed me up on the type of content I intended to include; such as, interviews, reviews etc.but also the style of language to use, i.e. quite contemporary. As the magazine is in competition with Kerrang! I also realise that I need to have a USP for my magazine so as to gain more attention from the public. One of the reasons I chose to do a case study on NME was because I am interested in focusing my magazine on this genre of music, though perhaps more pop/rock and it has shown me how to lay out a similarly themed magazine which will help me to compile my double-page spread."

Smash Hits! :

"From this case study I can conclude that I would want my magazine to be more sophisticated and be more focused on the songs and live performances of bands rather than the make-up, the video, the hair. It has also suggested the idea of polls however, which was also found in my audience research for my preliminary task and it is a possibility that I may include a poll in my magazine. Looking at examples of front covers, toned down colours would be more relevant to the genre I’m looking at and it shows that the theme of music you choose affects the images chosen also as smiley 90’s popstars is too cheesy for the style I am aiming for. I have also learnt from this that the music magazine industry has changed quite a lot as in the past, up to 16/17yr olds would have read Smash Hits yet now they wouldn’t, so pinpointing target audience is very necessary."

So the case studies have definitely helped me understand more about how to construct my music magazine.

I'm going to do some audience research similar to the Preliminary task, so another questionnaire, but I'm not going to give it just to students from my school this time, as the survey needs to get useful feedback and not everyone in my school likes Pop/Rock music, so I will probably find an online site to create the survey on and then give the URL to people I know through bands. I also hope to conduct a couple of interviews with some individuals for some more qualitative research.