Analysis of a Music Magazine

NME Magazine

New Musical Express commonly known as NME is a British music journalism magazine, first published in March 1952 with its association of Rock, Alternative and Indie music. The weekly magazine is acknowledged as being one of the earliest and biggest music magazines within the industry, known globally as the NME; this is reinforced as masthead is also the house style of the company, illustrating the importance of the magazine. The weekly magazine based in Southwark, London has a circulation of 15,000 in both print and digital editions. The paid circulations varies between 15,000 - 250,000 at its peak and the unpaid circulation out totals both of them with, 300,000 copies sold since they made the weekly issues free.

The magazine itself covers a variation of different article styles, featuring artists and musicians from complete different aspects of the spectrum chart. Although they are frequently known for their choice of rough contemporary artists within the rock genre, in recent years they have been exploring new cultures within the music industry allowing them to expand the brand through the use of dominant publishing. The content has changed through the years, as the magazine has expanded as the demand for present day and current affairs has increased. New Music Magazine offer an assortment of interviews, them being with the cover stars, general interviews with upcoming bands, mainstream articles are also featured in the weekly spread - normally with biggest worldwide scandal the title article. Comedy aspects and have also started appearing in the magazine in the last decade or so, this reinforces the attitudes that the magazine have tried to shape themselves into changing with the times; Instead of the magazine just focusing on music and film reviews like it used to.

The history of NME is something in which the company are proud of and use this for inspiration when coming up with new editions. It was originally a music newspaper and was recognized as being the best in the industry in the 1970's, this was when the paper was particularly known for its diverse association of punk and rock with the form of gonzo journalism (self-involved reporting - is a first person narrative approach to reporting, allowing personal experiences and emotions to contrast with the traditional style of journalism). The paper then gradually moved towards a magazine format between the 90's and 80's finally changing from newsprint in 1998. Since then the magazine has experienced changes between the contrasts of the content within the issues, this was mentioned in the previous paragraph.

I would say the style of the magazine has maintained the similar house style and feel to the paper over recent decades, as the masthead has always been of similar characteristic allowing readers to differentiate the magazine from others, whilst the cover images have also always been quite intimidating and bold images, either of artists or graphic design work - this is something in which has changed over time as the cover images of recent have become less aggressive and are more subtle. The target market of the magazine has revolutionized over the years majorly too, as the more current and stylized the issues have become the broader the genres mentioned have become. As when the magazine was first written back in the fifties the target audience was a male dominated spectrum, aged around 18+ to men in their late 30's. However in this day and age the companies target audience has become an even split for sex's - the current target audience is people aged 16+ aging up to their late twenties early thirties, this is clear as they have expanded their genres within the music industry as a whole. The multimedia aspects of NME are featured on their website: http://www.nme.com/ - with this online website link they are able to reach a broader audience within the industry instead of just publishing a weekly magazine. The website features ten links on its navigation bar allowing readers to subdivide into chosen interests, them being: news, reviews, new music, film, blogs, video, photos, tickets, lists and more. These are all sub-categories in which the print and online edition of the magazine include, however it is also a media publishing audience for the company to publicize their prints online.

Questionnaire Analysis

Questionnaire Analysis

When we read through the responses given in the questionnaire handed out to fellow EN students the responses were rather varied, however we managed to devise percentages to make it easier for our research purposes.

The main response to the first question which was ‘Do you read the college magazine?’ had a majority of people vote no – with a shocking 90% of students not reading the magazine, giving a clear development that the product is not reaching its target audience; with only 10% saying yes they read it. The second question which gave us an in depth response about colours used has allowed us to work out which colour scheme this magazine should have, they are: black, red, blue and white - these were the top four colours picked. When we asked the students about images on the cover page they only seemed to be a mixed choice about two answers, them being students work and a photograph of a student. The results were varied creating a percentage of 80% for students and only 20% student’s work, which is surprising.

The forth questioned asked the students about price ranges they would be willing to pay for the college magazine, the research experiment carried out four values and only two came back as a positive vote. The two most popular were between 50p and £1, the research suggested this was a majority of about 75%. The next question asked mentioned how often the magazine would be published, the main response was again split between a weekly magazine and every fort-night. The information in which would be featured within the spread was the most inclusive, as this information will be used in our magazine as it will be featured as cover lines on the main cover as well as links in the contents page. The responses were varied so here are the top six responses: college events, links towards technology, jobs information, a gig guide, films and subject information. The masthead will be named something to do with the college’s name, as the mixture was so varied a percentage can’t be written. The freebies question had an 85% review, whilst the online subscription had an even split with 50% each. 

College Magazine Cover Analysis

College Magazine Contents Page

College Magazine Front Cover