In class we spilt into groups of four to plan the type of music magazine that we each wanted to produce independently. We felt that working in a group situation to come up with the basics for our independent music magazines would be more useful than working alone as ideas can be created more easily in a group. I worked with Natalie Leese, Rathina Gunapalan and Rosannah Robinson. After discussing the type of magazine that we were all interested in creating individually, we chose to produce an Indie/Rock/Rock-Pop magazine for 16-25 year old females. We felt that NME was a good music magazine, and one that included the music genres that we want to include. However, NME is aimed quite heavily at a male audience. Therefore we decided to create a similar magazine that is aimed primarily at a female audience of the same age group. Taking inspiration from NME, our magazines will follow similar design and layout conventions.
After producing a mind map of names for each of the magazine, we each chose one. However, after careful consideration we decided that two of the four names we had decided on weren’t suitable for the genre of music magazine we were interesting in making, so we decided to use the two strongest names. Two members of our group will be using the name ‘Amp’ for their magazine and two members of the group will be using ‘Feedback’.
The publisher we chose to use is ‘Future Publishing‘ as they are a global publishing company that produce specialist interest magazines and use a small production team. ‘Amp’ will be aimed at a 16-25 year old audience of middle class Caucasian women with a crossover audience of different ethnicities and cultures. The Social Occupational Class that ‘Amp’ is aimed at is between B and C1. The magazine will be produced nationally and cost £2.40. Following conventions set by NME, ‘Amp’ will have around 70 pages and use matt paper as opposed to glossy paper. This will lower production cost meaning that less advertisement needs to be included. Out of the 70 pages, only 19 will be used for advertising purposes. This means that only 28% of the magazine will be used for advertising which is directly proportional to NME’s amount of advertising.
We worked in our groups to plan the type of magazine that we wished to create. We gathered a clear understanding of it’s readership and statistics and devised a reader profile and a flat plan as a group. However once the basic idea for the magazine was in place, we spilt and begun our independent work on our own individual magazines.
AS Media Studies 