Analysis Of Music Magazines:

Metal Hammer

Target Audience:Mature Teens and Young Adults

Price: £4:25

Extras: Free CD's Posters and Stickers

Logo: Metal overshadowed by the dominating 'Hammer'
Hammer giving the connotation of metal anyway.
The text is broad, recognizable and not delicate or ornate. A halfway-house between that of Kerrang and Classic Rock.

Kerrang

Target Audience:Mostly teens

Price:£2:20

Extras:Posters and Stickers

Logo: A good characterization of Punk Rock, punchy, sloppy, battered around the edges. Brilliant for appealing to teenage audiences.

Classic Rock

Target Audience: Almost all Adults

Price:£4.50

Extras: Free CD's Posters and Stickers

Logo: Not brilliantly elegant like calligraphy writing, but a much more refined logo than Kerrang. The idea of 'Classic' being unimportant, while 'Rock' stands out on the page is essentially the same as Metal and Hammer. Unlike Kerrang, the logo is sophisticated and tidy, appealing to it's more mature target audience.


Primary Research:

To get an understanding of what the majority content was in music magazines I went through an Issue of Rocksound and made a tally of different types of pages, I then compared this against the total number of pages (131) and turned the data into a pie chart. As seen below:

The pie chart clearly shows that Band interviews and news of upcoming events take precedence in Rocksound and this is something that my Contents page would have to reflect to make it seem more realistic. Below is the table for raw data, giving a numerical breakdown of the statistics.

Band Interviews	58
Reader Submitted Content	14
News of upcoming events, tours and albums	39
Adverts	11
Other (Contents, Posters,Puzzles)	9
Total	131

I then started asking friends, family, peers at school about their music magazine habits and preferences. The statistics and explanation are below.

	Under 13	14-16	17-21	22-30	31-45	Over 46
Age	2	7	19	5	6	1
	Jazz	Classical	Classic Rock	Alternative Rock	Pop	Electronic
Preference of musical genre (first and second choice)	4,9	5,2	8,14	6,1	9,4	3,5
	Never	On Occasion or only special issues	Almost Bi-Monthly	Almost Bi-weekly	Almost Weekly or more
How often do you buy music magazines	3	11	12	6	3
	Under £2	£2-£3	£3-£4	£4-£4.50	£4.51-£5.00	£5.01-£5.51	£5.51-£6.00	£6.00	N/A
How expensive is your chosen music magazine		6	6	15	3	1	1	2	3
	CD	Poster	Stickers	Toy	None	N/A
What freebies does your magazine come with	19	31	27	4	2	3
	Not particularly	Partly	Mostly	Very Much	N/A
Are you generally satisfied with your magazine	1	4	16	11	3
	Total Asked
	35

Some things like a free poster were obviously going to be popular and expected free items to come with the magazine.

Classic Rock and Jazz were shown to be popular second choices for people's preferred music magazines.

What surprised me the most was that 14 out of 35 people said that they either never bought music magazines, or only went for special issues.