Research - Front Cover

Before finishing my magazine front cover, I decided to do some more research into what designs are already on the market and what sort of age groups that other music magazines are aimed at. I retrieved the target markets for Kerrang!, Mojo and Q at the Bauer Media site. I bought myself a Kerrang! magazine to find out what sort of headlines are used and what is mentioned on the front page. It gave me an idea of details to include and effects to use, considering my magazine was going to be based on a rock/grunge type magazine. I also looked online for other Kerrang! magazine front covers to see the different variation. To give me even more of a variation, I also decided to research into other types of music magazines such as mojo or nme. Here are some of my findings, feel free to click the links for websites and media packs!:


Kerrang!:

Audience profile for Kerrang!:

Individually minded, independent of thought and musically experienced, an audience defined by attitude, passion and loyalty.

Mojo:

Audience Profile for Mojo:

Discerning and passionate music aficionados, the MOJO audience is predominately male (72%) and affluent (36% AB). These heavy consumers of music see their passion as discovery without boundaries, genre and decade being secondary to quality.

Q:

Audience Profile for Q:

Open minded experience seekers, the Q audience don’t define themselves by the music they listen to. Music is an important passion, but their love of music will never be to the detriment of their other passions, such as film, sport and comedy.

NME:

Key Facts for NME (Click for media pack):

Please excuse the differences between these statistics and the ones on my magazine analysis.
Price   £2.20 
Frequency  Weekly
Circulation  56,284
Readership  411,000
Launch Date 1952
Male/Female 73%/27%
Average Age 25
ABC1   73%
Target Market Men 17-30

I was inspired in many ways from these music magazines, which gave me ideas such as placing the head's of the characters on the front cover's over the title, giving a drop shadow to some of the writing or even mini pictures, using plain backgrounds, slanting some writing which is very effective, or even placing a bar across the top showing what is exclusive inside the magazine. Including circle sticker type things advertising competitions or free included tokens etc... drew my attention.

The headlines also gave me a few ideas and showed me the sort of language used inside the magazine. Writing with speechmarks indicating chunks taken from inside the magazine is very effective as it draws the reader to the idols' thoughts. I drew up a plan for a contents page for what sort of things could be included in the magazine for which people may read which also gave me ideas for headlines and pieces to take from the contents and place on the front cover, considering it is the front cover which is seen first. I realised that the main headers on the front are about the person on the front cover which gave me a huge indication of what to use for the main header on my music magazine.