AS Media Blog: March 2013

The pink and yellow colour scheme used links to the alternative genre of the magazine but also associates with the sex pistols, a group of young rebellious artists that were a real showcase of what music is capable of and inspiring others to do the same being part of a whole wave of the punk culture in Britain.

I felt that using this colour scheme inspires the young target audience that are mostly likely in the E category of the demographic scale, still in education. A shared common experience is teenagers hearing of how their parents went

through the great ‘phases’ when they were at college or university but those that are also describes as the best years of their life.

My magazine is purposely put at a low cost as those inside the E category do not generally have large amounts of disposable income as they are still in education. Therefore, I priced my magazine around £2, a happy medium between a low quality 50p magazine, written poorly with the majority of pages being meaningless advertisements, and a high quality £5 magazine, printed on more expensive materials, glossy cover and written by high paid, renowned writers.

Furthermore, the magazine aims to only have around 35-40 pages, making it a seemingly short magazine. This is because my target audience are likely to still be in college/university and will therefore already struggle to find the time to finish all of their work never mind have spare time to read a magazine. Therefore MOB magazine aims to keep news short and snappy, with finely tuned articles that deliver all of the information needed in not too many words. Furthermore generally speaking, college students aren’t likely to want to read pages upon pages of anything even if it’s about something they are interested in, therefore it is not necessary to print all of these extra pages with such a low percentage of the target audience that would read them.

Famously, record shops when in their prime were meeting places for the younger kids, turning up, saving their money and speaking to people that share similar tastes in music, and being recommended music by the connoisseurs that were the record shop owners. I wanted to create this idea but in a modern concept of a magazine, featuring both underground and popular artists that readers could discover and find out information about artists that they may never have heard about yet could go on to be one of their favourites.

The reader profiles I looked at were NME and MOJO magazine, both magazines that don’t quite represent the mainstream music industry but mostly artists of an ‘alternative’ genre in some way or another which is similar to mine. From the two, I found that the age range can vary for this genre of music, with NME featuring new and upcoming artists as well as their inspirations in the form of older, classic bands and this appealed to a much younger audience. MOJO however generally appealed to a much older audience that are in full time employment with a regular income. This means that they can afford to spend a

little extra on a higher quality of magazine with MOJO being more expensive than the average music magazine. The content of MOJO was however the much older classic artists like for example the likes of Paul Weller and The Jam.