My magazine has a very specific target audience of the student years and a mainly male majority of readership. I came to this decision after my analysis section showed me that similar magazines that would be competing for the same market have the same sort of male dominated readership. I checked three separate magazines and their media packs to see what my rough target audience should be. Q, NME and Kerrang! All showed me that my target audience should be from around the age of 16 to about 24. All of these magazines also have a male majority of readership which bought me to the conclusion that the genre itself has more male fans than female, this meant that if my magazine was going to attract the most readers in a large market I had to try and appeal to student males, the target market for this genre and all competing magazines.
I have tried to appeal to my target market in the choices I’ve made on the appearance of my magazine, the language used in my articles and the bands featured on the contents page. As I wanted to appeal to a more male audience I tried to include a large majority of male artists on my contents page, this was fairly easy as the genre itself is mainly full of male artists and bands such as Coldplay, Elbow and the Killers. This meant that I was appealing to the male majority of potential readers, which was a good start.
Also, I tried to use very informal and engaging language in my article and on my contents page. I did this because the use of informal language would appeal to a younger audience, as required if I’m going to appeal to my target market. Also, after my research I found that the current magazines out there are read by so many people because they are full of interviews that allow the reader to know more about their favourite bands and new and up and coming bands. Therefore I felt that I had to do an interview style article for my double page spread. I also felt like I had to use an up and coming band for my article, my research told me that many people in my target audience read the currently available magazines to keep up with the latest new bands and trends. Therefore I felt that an interview with a new band would be a very good idea. My colour scheme also took into consideration what the current market used. My research told me that the current magazines for this genre used a base colour of black and white and then used a brighter colour to engage the reader, this colour was usually red. However I wanted to use a different colour to really stand out on a magazine shelf and bring readers in from the very start. Therefore I chose to use green; this is a very youthful colour which connotes happiness and also neutrality which could represent the huge variety of music available in this genre. Plus it is a much underused colour in music magazines, which means it would easily be seen and previous readers of my magazine would make a direct link to the colour green and my magazine making it easily remember able.
However, after getting feedback on my draft magazine I decided that green wasn’t the best colour because my peers and teacher believed that this bright and fresh colour was too far away from the genre to ever be recognised as alternative rock by new readers. Therefore I spent a couple of lessons experimenting which colour I could use. I had to ensure I didn’t use red, because this is the usual colour for this genre of music which can be seen on NME and Q. I didn’t want to use red because I wanted my magazine to seem fresh and different while also bringing a familiar feel to the magazine that would be automatically remembered by previous readers of my magazine. I then ended up choosing blue, this is a fresh colour when looking at the magazine rivals I may face and it would also be very different to see on a magazine shelf and would instantly draws a potential buyer’s attention in. This may give me an edge against the already popular alternative rock magazines.
I believe that it is very important to be selective when choosing a target audience for many reasons. Firstly, by choosing a specific age range and gender, it is easier for the magazine writers to write for a specific audience. For example, if you weren’t specific with who your target audience was, your writers would have a very difficult task writing an article that would appeal to someone of the age of 8 and 80. The use of simple words that younger kids would know is not the makings of an engaging article for the older generations; therefore I believe it is very important to be specific with who your market consists of.
Secondly, the market must be specific because you have to decide what artists to feature inside your magazine. If your market is both male and female of equal proportions then you would have to feature the same amount of male and female artists. That in this genre of music would be very difficult because this genre of music seems to be very male dominant with the biggest female band probably being Paramore, who’s only female is the singer. Therefore I believe it is very important that when designing a magazine the person takes into account an age range they wish to appeal for and which gender they think would be more interested in that genre of music.
However by being selective you do exclude certain audiences from being interested in your magazine. This is by using such formal language, it then therefore doesn’t appeal to an older generation as much as my current target audience. But saying that, my genre of music doesn’t appeal to the older generations on a large scale anyway. The only real market I may miss out on by making my target audience so specific is the female population of the same age. My research told me that all magazines suited to this genre of music all appealed to men more than women. Therefore I did some research one the genre itself and Alternative rock is known to have a more male audience than female. This however doesn’t mean any women like the genre. I believe the only real way my magazine does exclude them is with the choices of bands found on my contents page. On the other hand there was no real way around this as the genre of music is dominated by male artists and female artists are very rare indeed in this genre.
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