Magazine Analysis Essay

All kinds of music magazines have a similar way of laying out their front covers. For example usually there is a main feature in the magazine (ie. a band/singer) this is usually centred in the middle of the magazine with surrounded text around them showing other topics in the magazine. 

The only main difference when it comes to genre of music is the colour connotations used. This typically catches the eye of the target audience for that genre. An example would be black and red can be related with rock but lighter colours can be represented with trance/house.

Also it appears that most music magazines seem to have the main feature covering up most of the title, this is so that the viewer wont neccisarily see the title but see more of the band or singer there. The main feature in alot of magazines are also making eye contact with the viewer, this is so that the viewer feels some how connected to the feature and feels unique and will hopefully buy the magazine in the end.

There can also be free samples with the magazine (e.g. CD or posters) to persuade the viewer to buy it as they get more for their money. They also put catchy slogans or abbriviations of words around the feature linking to a page. This is so the viewer which would presumebly be a youth target audience to be interested and buy it to find out more.

The contents page is usually unorganised and slanted, this is again to link with the youth target audience for a sence of rebelling and laidback feeling to it. There can be a list of topics and then page numbers next to them, so that the viewer can skip to their favourite topic that they are interested it. Finally they also use pictures of live gigs in a lot of music magazines content pages, and these are linked to pages in the mag itself, so if the viewer is a visual learner then they would perform to see pictures instead or long texts.

Double page spreads are usually effective as the whole page seems linked to a certain topic, and if this topic is interesting then it is likely that people will be interested. They also seem to use both pages as an over lap of an image. This is to make the feature look massive and eye catching.

Audience Research

I did a survey on this website called 'www.surveymonkey.com' this let me ask all types of questions to do with music.

Firstly i asked whether the person doing the survey was a male or female. The results were as follows.

As you can see the majority of people using the survey were guys.

The next question was what age range were they. The results are as follows:

As you can see most people who took this survey was in the age between 13 - 18.

The next question i asked was what genre of music they perfered. The results are as follows:

 As you can see the majority of people liked the denre of Rock or Pop the most.

The next question i asked was how much they listen to music in a week. The results are as follows:

 As you can see alot of people listen to music constantly throughout the week.

My next question on the survey was what title of magazine they perfered. The results are as follows:

 As you can see the favourite was 'Live' so therefore i will call my coursework by this title.

My last question of the survey was whether they bought or downloaded music. The results are as follows:

 As it shows the proportion of people who download music to buy music is high.

Analysis of Contents of a Music Magazine

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