What do Audiences want from a Music Magazine?

A music magazine is a physical thing that you can go into a shop and buy, but if that was it then no one would buy it. In order for a music magazine to sell copies it has to be interesting for the audience. Most of the audience would want it to provide lots of information that they find interesting which means that they can enjoy reading it. Therefore the information must be presented in an easy-to-read way so that the majority of the readership can understand what it is talking about.

It must maintain the same tone throughout the magazine's issues and in most cases it must be consistent. For example, if a rock magazine such as Rock Sound started talking about classical music then it's going to loose most of its target readership who buy it because the majority of them won't want to read about classical music. The genre of a music magazine must reflect the audience that read it. For example Kerrang! focuses on attracting a teenage and young adult audience who like rock music while NME focuses on wider range of genres (alternative, rock and indie) which shows that it is more generalised, so people who buy NME are likely to music overall, but it focuses on alternative, rock and indie, while Kerrang! goes into a lot more detail in the rock genre.


Magazines can not just appeal to their audiences through their content either, they can also do this through use of incentives such as CDs, posters and competitions. Posters are most likely to appeal to teenagers, but as the graph shows, overall the biggest incentive for a reader to buy a magazine would be a CD accompanying the magazine.

The demand of the audience of a music magazine is constantly changing which reflects the fact that most of the information that they provide to readers is now available online. To counteract this music magazines are being made available online as well to reach the bigger audiences again.

This development is specifically focused around the fact that the current young generation are mostly online, spending a lot of their time on social networking sites. A free magazine such as NME therefore stands to benefit the most from this because it doesn't need to restrict who is copying it as much since it doesn't need to charge for every issue it sells. In fact, this would benefit it because it means that its adverts are reaching more people so it makes more money.

The results of my research will help me to plan my own magazine because I now know that posters have a much bigger draw-in factor than competitions so I need to advertise this on my magazine's front cover.