What I've Learnt About Music Magazines
Through this term we have looked at various styles of music magazines from different publishers and have compared them to see the similarities and differences throughout. In my personal research I looked at Kerrang, Metal Hammer and NME.
The results of my questionnaire also helped me when it came to looking at what audiences expect to see from music magazines, I asked the other students in my class and other friends online to fill out my questionnaire so that I knew what people who read music magazines liked about them, what they would like to see more of, and also reasons why people do not tend to read music magazines. This helped me out a lot in terms of looking at content of the magazine, pricing and free items to include.
Looking at existing magazines has taught me that each magazine has its own house style that it follows with every issue. This tends to be things like fonts, masthead position and the layout of the pages within. My magazine cover analysis post explains the house style of the house style of Metal Hammer magazine. Looking at other products has also taught me a lot about the content in the magazines. An example of this is the use of profanity in an article of NME magazine from 9 Feb 2013. The use of language shows how they are aware of their target audience and use language suitable to them. This is something that I have taken into consideration when producing my magazine.
By watching a four-part documentary on NME, I also learnt about what goes on behind the publishing of a magazine and how the publishers go about fitting in with trends even if it does not quite fit in with their target audience.
Inky Fingers: Pt 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1yGHy1-hfU
Inky Fingers: Pt 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4AbiogpuCQ
Inky Fingers: Pt 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx5r52RnY-Y
Inky Fingers: Pt 4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2g6V5Tenzo
After watching the four-part documentary, I produced a blog post based on what I had taken away from watching the video.
After looking through magazines, we then began to look at the images used in magazines and how they were edited. In order to fully understand this, we had a lesson on using PhotoShop at basic level. It is this lesson where we learnt how to manipulate images to change the colours, backgrounds and how to fix an image. This will come in helpful for me when I take pictures to use in my magazine because I will be able to manipulate them so that they look a lot better and to make them fit in to my magazine better.
After completing my first lot of research, my priorities are to follow the results that I got back from my questionnaire. This is because as a publisher it is important to know what the audience are after and to follow demands in order to make a magazine a hit with the audience. So when I am producing my magazine I will be sure to follow my results so that I can make sure that my content and images are suitable for my audience and so that I can guarantee that they will enjoy reading my magazine.
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