Research

This part is all my own initial research that allowed me to find out more about music magazines and get inspiration and ideas so that I can move foward successfully in my creation of my own music magazine.

Facts and Figures
Ciculation reporting firm ABC, had some disapoining news for UK music magazines: readers are getting their music news elsewhere.
Q lost 8,000 readers over the last 6months, NME lost 8000 readers and Kerrang! lost 17,000 readers
January-June 2008 Circulation (Prior 6months)

• Classic Rock 66,632(67,339)
• Kerrang! 60,294 (76,937)
• Metal Hammer 48,540 (45,809)
• Mixmag 34,073 (35,817
• Mojo 106,367 (106 218)
• NME 56,284 (64,033)
• Q 113,174 (131,330)
• Rock Sound 22,527 (23,021)
• Word 33,775 (33,217)

Music Research

As I have chosen to create a magazine that promotes female artists who perform music from the genres of RnB, Pop and indie, I have decided to research the charts to see how many of the artists in this chart are females who specialize in my choice of music genres. My theory is that the more female artists there are in the UK chart, the more popular my magazine will be due to the fact that if people in the UK like to listen to female solo artists and the genres of music RnB, pop and Indie, and so will enjoy reading about it too.

1. Kelly Clarkson- My life would suck without you.

2. Taylor swift- Love story.

3. Lady GaGa- Poker face

4. T.I Ft. Justin Timberlake- Dead and gone

5. Lily Allen- The fear 

6. Lady GaGa- Just dance

7. Kings Of Leon- Use somebody

8. Shontelle- T-shirt

9. Pussycat Dolls Ft. Misyy Elliott- Whatcha' think about that

10. Alesha Dixon- Breathe

As you can see from the above,  8 out of the 10  singles that are in the top 10 singles chart are by female artists who specialise in singing particulary RnB and Pop. From this evidence I can be sure that female artists are particulary popular in todays music industry. I therefore hope that my magazine will be just as popular.  

Music Magazine Research

For inspiration for my music magazine, I researched some current or discontinued music magazines that are already available to buy or have been in previous years. I found, when researching, that there are a only two kinds of music magazines. One for the rock/heavy metal genre, and one for the more pop side of music.
Below are some images of music magazines that I found from the two genres.

I noticed when having researched these magazines, that some are more appealing than other and i narrowed it down to two of my personal favourites, Rolling Stones and Q magazine.My reasons being that I feel they are the most attractive with the colours contrasting well and therefore looking much more appealing. Rolling stones has a very clear layout with a much lighter backgound which allows the images and dominant text to stand out.

Most music magazines feature agenda-setting news, the UK's most comprehensive gig guide, definate reviews of the weeks's hottests gigs, tracks, albums and fiery comments from the nations most opinionated . These are the kinds of things that readers are thirsty for in a music magazine and so I will include these in the creation of my very own music magazine, in order to attract readers.

Design and magazine type determines the audience of which the magazine is distributed to and so I will be using a modern design to go with the music genre and gender audience, therefore my magazine will appeal to all people of anyone interested in music of popular genres such as RnB, Pop and Indie.