Draft Design - Feature Article

Draft Design - Contents Page

Draft Design - Front Cover

Media Mood Board - Colours

Colour Scheme 1 is the colour scheme I am most likely to use on the front cover of my music magazine because I believe these colours conform to the musical genre of Alternative Rock the most. Colour Scheme 2 and Colour Scheme 3 are back up plans.

Overview of Magazine Industry

Overview of Magazine Industry

The vital statistics of the magazine industry are that there are more than 8000 titles that are published in Britain. They can be placed into seven categories. Number one is consumer which is general and specialist, these are sold in newsagents and are also available online. Number two is business, trade, professional and B2B for people at work. Number three is customer magazines that organisations give to their customers as a form of marketing. Number four is staff magazines to inform staff about their company. Number five is newspaper supplements; they come free as part of daily or Sunday paper. Number six is part works which is a set number of issues builds up into an encyclopaedia on a specific topic. Lastly number seven is academic journals; these are for university-level discussion of all sorts of arcane topics.

Consumer magazines make up the bulk of the titles for sale in newsagents. They may be general titles that aim to entertain and inform. Examples of these are Loaded, Elle and Radio Times. There are also consumer specialist titles aimed at a specific interest or hobby. Examples of these are Car, Total Film and Gardener’s World. The top four consumer magazine publishers are Bauer Publishing 25%, IPC Media 20%, BBC 7.8% and National magazine company 7.3%. However in October 2011 Immediate Media bought out BBC Magazines.

Today in the UK there are over 3,200 different consumer titles in 1980 there were only 1,383. 1.4 billion Magazines are sold each year it was 1.1 billion in 1970 and 1.2 billion in 1992. 85% of the population reads a magazine. Advertisers spent £745 million in magazines in 2008. Consumers spend £2 billion on magazines annually. An average of 500 new magazines has been launched every year in the past decade. Only 3 in 10 titles survive for more than 4 years.

Top 5 Women’s monthly magazines in 2013 are Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Yours, Woman and Home and Good Housekeeping. Top 5 children’s and Teen magazines in 2013 are Moshi Monsters Magazine, Fun to Learn – Peppa Pig, Fun to Learn – Friends, CBeebies Art and Top of the Pops. Lastly the top 4 Men’s lifestyle magazines are Men’s Health, Nuts, FHM and GQ.      

Original Statement

                                                          Original Statement

The musical genre of my music magazine is going to be alternative rock. It will also contain some separate music genres such as rock, pop and indie combined with the main musical genre of alternative rock.   I am going to include band interviews within the magazine and tickets to concerts and/or festivals. My primary target audience for my magazine is going to be festival goers who are interested in finding and discovering new music, wherever they can find it. This can be from socialisng with friends, or from discovering new music on the internet through Social Media or YouTube.  These people are going to spend a lot of money on concerts and love everything to do with festivals. From the camping, to the food stalls that are there, they love it all. So by providing tickets to festivals and concerts this will more likely attract the intended target audience to purchase and read the music magazine. This means that a lot of advertisers within my magazine are going to be festival related. Major festivals and festival sponsors will be advertised within the magazine such as V Festival, Latitude, Festival Republic and the Reading and Leeds Festivals. With that it will include the latest line-ups of festivals in order to attract the target audience to attend, plus competitons to enter once tickets have sold out to major music festivals around the UK. 

 

The overall class and age of my target audience will be early 20s and middle class, they will be able to spend a lot of money attending festivals when they can. So it will be students who have graduated from university and whom have obtained high/managerial jobs, who are doing successful so far in their life. This target market that I will aim my magazine at will be into new and trendy music that will appeal to their social class that they are from. So again this will reflect the advertisers that will be within my magazine. I will be including high market clothing companies such as Jack Wills, Converse and Vans and also including popular food chains such as McDonalds and Subway. Televsion that they watch will be relatively normal as my target audience wont probably watch high market specific televison programmes. So again it will be popular televison prorammes such as Family Guy, The Simpsons and EastEnders. Advertisers will be a major reflection of my target audience’s interests and hobbies, especially the type of music that they may listen to.    

Media Mood Board - Fonts

These are some of the fonts that I may put as the masthead for my music magazine. They will be the main piece of text that the reader will look at when they purchase the magazine. So picking the fonts for the magazine is an important aspect of the planning process for my magazine.

Media Mood Board - Advertisers

Target Audience Mood Board

Overview of IPC Media

                                                                    IPC Media

IPC Media is a consumer magazine and digital publisher that is based in the United Kingdom. It is the second biggest in the United Kingdom behind another media publishing group Bauer. The company sell over 350 million copies of magazines worldwide. The publishing company was founded in 1958 and has been publishing magazines ever since. Cecil Harmsworth King was appointed its chairman in 1959. He was a former chairman of a newspaper group which includes The Daily Mirror and The Sunday Pictorial which is now known in the present day as The Sunday Mirror.

IPC Media is recognised worldwide through its different separate publishing groups for its different media products that it makes. These include IPC Newspapers  which includes the publishing of The People and The Sun. IPC Magazines where they publish magazines and comics for the consumer market. IPC Trade and Technical who are known for their trade name IPC Business Press Ltd. IPC Books for the publishing of books to a consumer market, this is headed by Paul Hamlyn. IPC Printing is headed by Arnold Quick, they print the IPC media products. Lastly there is IPC New Products headed by Alistair McIntosh. This department is responsible for the distribution of new products under IPC Media.

Cecil Harmsworth King was chairman from 1959 to 1968. In 1968 he was replaced by his deputy chairman Hugh Cudlipp a former newspaper editor. In 1970 IPC-Mirror Group was taken over by Albert E Reed, this meant that the company was renamed Reed International. During the 1990's IPC launched the new "loaded" magazines. IPC media were responsible for creating the wave of "Lad's mags". In 1992 Reed International underwent another change becoming Reed Elseiver. Then in 1998 IPC Magazines Ltd was bought out by Cinven, a venture capital group, thus the company was then again renamed back to IPC Media.

Evelyn Webster is currently the chief executive of IPC Media. In April 2012 IPC Media won an award for Best Production Team of the Year at the Professional Publishers Association Production and Environmental Awards 2012. IPC Media have three main publishing divisons up to this day. Connect that has a mass target audience of Women. Southbank who target upmarket women and Inspire which targets the mass market of men. So overall IPC Media as a publishing company have a target audience of everybody who consumes and uses media products.

Full Analysis of NME Music Magazine

Full Analysis of NME magazine

On the NME Media pack we are given a full analysis into the stats and distribution of NME magazines. Readers are able to investigate what goes on behind the scenes into the making of a well-recognised music magazine.

First of all we are given the masthead which spans across the majority of the top left hand side of the page. This enables readers to identify that the media pack is NME because of the world famous logo that they use. On every magazine issue this is a bold red written in bold capital letters. Down the side of this media pack we have three example issues of what NME magazines look like. NME has gone with the alternative rock genre of music. For example they have used main front cover images from the likes of Oasis, Lana Del Rey and Blur. It is clear therefore, that the target audience of NME enjoy listening to alternative music. Therefore, by having these three front covers available to look at means that the target audience feel that they are involved and included in the making of the NME music front covers, because their taste in music has been taken on board in the development of each issue of magazine.

Readers are also able to investigate the reader profile of every copy of an NME magazine. Readers are given quotes such as “The world’s most famous music magazine”, “I can trust it” and “Honest no-holds barred reviews”. These are quotes designed so that not only do NME gain the target audience that they already have but a target audience who may have never read NME before, because it is drawing in a different crowd of people through the way in which these quotes are written as if it is to a new audience. These kinds of quotes can inspire different people to read an issue of the magazine. The key stats of the readers are also outlined to us. The fact that 63% of males read it and 37% of females read it means that it is a male dominated music magazine. Therefore the editors are going to feature musical genres and bands that men listen to because they recognised that this is the majority of their target audience. The median age of the magazine is also outlined as 25. So this explains why a lot of NME issues of magazines feature bands that are trendy to listen to and appeal to a younger age generation. This is because editors will want to feature bands that appeal to men in their 20s, whom enjoy listening to alternative rock music because this is how editors are going to make their sales. So readers get an idea of what kind of age people are who read NME. Another interesting fact that is highlighted in the key stats is the fact that only 26% of students read the magazine. This is because NME is a fairly expensive magazine to purchase £2.40 on the front cover of the Lana Del Rey issue of the magazine. So again this gives us a lot of detail as to whom NME’s target audience is. Young, middle class men who can afford to buy the magazine. Readership is at 247,000 which gives us an idea that NME tend to have a specific target audience who like a specific music genre. This is through the fact that this readership isn’t very high if this is worldwide readership.

NME readers themselves listen to a lot of music a third download music. 75% read about music online and 58% say that adverts and bands/new music releases influence how they discover new music. These figures overall benefit editors on what kind of advertisement they need to put in their issues of NME magazines. In this case it would be to do with new bands touring, going to festivals/concerts etc.

People who visit NME website account for only 38.10% in the UK meaning that people who visit the official site are spread across worldwide. Readers can also investigate new music and new music magazine editions through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Mobile UU and Page Imps. This enables the target audience to discover new music. To follow bands that they are interesting in, to like pages and to share music with friends as well. So we get a sense that NME don’t just operate within their music magazines but also a lot more technologically as well through social media and the internet.

And lastly NME readers can also get an insight into what goes on in the making of each issue of an NME magazine and this is through the rate card section of the NME media pack. For example how much it costs to develop the Outside Back Cover, Inside Front Cover and Inside Back Cover. However, the most important aspect to take into account on this page is how much advertisement costs, because this in its self is going to attract the target audience into listening to different genres or different bands within the music industry. A double page spread costs £12,456 a whole page costs £6,920 a half page (horizontal and vertical) costs £5,350 and a quarter page costs £2,755. This enables advertising firms to identify how big their advert is going to be that the put in NME. The pricing helps them decide what they can afford to put in. This also affects the target audience because the larger an advert is the more chance that someone will see it. NME also has to rely on the advertisement aspect of their magazine otherwise NME do not generate enough sales and wouldn’t run effectively as a business.

So overall the media pack for NME is designed to help the target audience, editors of NME and advertising firms come to an overall conclusion about NME.