Conventions, Producer and Target Audience of my Text

In my magazine, I hope to keep many of the key conventions present in my magazine. As mentioned in my Main Task Proposal Table, I will be including major conventions in my magazine such as: keeping the masthead to the top-left hand side of the main cover, including sell lines (as well as a main sell line) on the main cover to give the reader an incentive to pick up the magazine and purchase it based on the articles inside. As well as this, I will also be including essential information, including a barcode and issue date in the lower-right corner of the main cover. On the contents page, I wish to implement the text 'contents' somewhere on the page (traditionally being placed on the top right, next to the masthead). The list/table of contents is normally placed on the right hand side of the page, and I may differ the position of it within my magazine to cause my magazine to stand out from other ones. For the language used, I hope to include an informal yet equally serious tone to the magazine to ensure the reader feels comfortable in reading the text. For the colour scheme, I hope to implement a red/white/black colour scheme that is present across the various different music magazines that I have researched previously. Finally, I plan to use a simple font style throughout my entire magazine. By using simple fonts such as Times New Roman or Arial, I will be able to produce easy-to-read articles as well as keeping the font style moderately interesting. Times New Roman also produces connotations with a professional-quality magazine, meaning that this font would be a sensible choice. I do not plan to change any of these conventions as I still hope to achieve an effective magazine feel via my magazine.

For the distribution my magazine, I have previously researched the institutions that deal with the publication of various different magazines. Based on this research, I had numerous different options available to me, including IPC Media and Bauer Media (the two largest music magazine publishers, with the former publishing ‘NME’ and the latter publishing ‘Q’ and ‘Kerrang!’). I decided to opt for Bauer Media, as this is the institution who deals with the publication of ‘Q’, a music magazine from which my own takes a good deal of inspiration and conventions from. Judging by the success of ‘Q’ and ‘Kerrang!’, I can assume the company is capable of dealing with publishing more than one music magazine at the same time (as well as doing a good job at it too). The demographic which is usually associated with reading the two magazines published by Bauer Media is not dissimilar to the demographic which I hope to aim for with my own magazine, meaning that by picking Bauer Media to publish my magazine, they are already well experienced with the target audience which I hope to aim for (the 13-34 year old demographic).

Relating to the demographic and target audience, I was able to gather information as to what different people’s preferences were towards different ideas or suggestions after carrying out research on a group of random participants. I stated that my poll was a ‘music’ questionnaire, and the age range of the people who took the questionnaire were between 13 and 34, which then enabled me to see that publishing a music magazine with that age range in mind would do rather well. Based on the audience research, I decided upon not targeting my magazine towards one specific gender, as feedback from my research showed that 55% were male, and 45% were female – indicating that there was not one specific gender that would be interested in reading a music magazine. I also found that people listened to numerous different styles of music, however Rock and Indie/Alternative were the two most popular. This lets me know that by making Rock/Indie/Alternative the primary style of my magazine, I can say that there will be a fair amount of readers who would be willing to read the magazine.

For the platforms on which I would like to make my music publication available, I would be inclined to lean towards making it available on as many platforms as possible. The number of magazines made available in other forms other than physical copies is surprisingly low. Because of this, publishing the magazine in other formats than the one expected will enable the magazine to attract a wider audience, possibly allowing more people to subscribe, which was one of the key things I picked up on when conducting my audience research. Very few people stated that they had subscribed to an existing music publication, meaning that by publishing the magazine in an unorthodox manner, it will show the audience that the magazine is not the same as the other music publications that are present at the current time, giving them an incentive to subscribe to something new or original.