Here is a mind map of the features I would expect to see in a music magazine. I have done research on a number of other music magazines of similar genre to mine and found that they all feature the things I have put on my mind map. This is useful in my planning because I can now decide exactly what I want to put in the contents of my magazine and I know that the things I include will be appealing to my target audience and will help my magazine fit in with other magazines of a similar genre.
Category Archives: Planning
Music Magazine Names
I am going to call my magazine Crash because this is one of the most popular names chosen by the people who did my survey on Survey Monkey. This is also relevant to my music genres because the songs are often loud and have lots of fast drums beats in them so crash being an onomatopoeic word is relevant to this, Crash is also a type of drum cymbal and so can be related to this genre of music because a lot of the bands play their own instruments and drums is a big part of that.
Images for Music Magazine
Front Cover:
For the central image on the front cover of my magazine I am going to use a posed studio image of the band Tusk. The image will be a mid shot and will show them all from the hips up. Evie is the lead singer of the group and is the main attraction so she will be the most prominent person, she will be stood closer to them camera than the other three members and will be blowing a kiss to the camera. The three boys will be stood all to the left of Evie so that they are all visible and will be just smiling at the camera. I will edit the background so that it is completely black.
There will be two secondary images on the front cover. One of these will be an image of the front cover of an album. The other will be a mid shot of Katie and James in the ‘ROCK’S MOST FAMOUS DUO ARE BACK’ section. This will also be a posed studio shot and will show the head and torso of both the people, they will be smiling.
Contents Page:
I will have a shot of a girl wearing some band merchandise looking happy. Showing her from the knees upwards.
There will also be a mid shot picture of Katie and James looking at some music and lyrics.
There will also be a picture from a gig and some small images of album covers.
Double Page Spread:
On the double page spread I will have another image of Tusk, from their waists upwards, all looking at the camera and looking serious. I will also have an individual image of Evie smiling innocently. There will also be a picture from a live gig that will look as though it is Tusk playing.
Magazine Articles
Here is a mind map of the articles I have chosen to appear in my magazine. They are mainly interviews because on the results of my survey on Survey Monkey it showed that my target audience mainly like to see interviews with their favourite bands in a music magazine. I have chosen popular bands within the genre of music I am focusing on because I believe this will help to sell my magazine to the audience.
Music Magazine Double Page Spread Draft
I have done a very basic sketch of the layout for my double page spread just to decide how the text will be positioned and where the pictures will look best so that both pages look full. I have not written any of the body text in because I just needed to decide the layout and if I wrote all the text in it would look messy as a draft. I believe it is best to have some text on both pages and make sure neither page is too picture or text heavy. I have also planned rough positions for my pull quotes so I don’t have too many of them in the same place.
Music Magazine Contents Draft
Here I have drawn a rough sketch of what I want my contents page to look like. It is very basic and looks very full of text because I haven’t drawn any of the pictures in, so in hindsight it would have been a better idea to sketch the images too. However it does give me a good idea of how the different elements on the page will be set out and it shows what features will be on all the pages so I will save a lot of time when constructing my contents page. I will make thicker borders around the images and make the text neatly aligned to stop the page looking as messy as it does here.
Music Magazine Front Cover Draft
Here is a rough draft of what I want my front cover to look like. It gives me a basic idea of how I am going to lay the page out and I can see from this whether certain elements work well together. This makes the construction of my front cover a lot quicker because I can just follow the positioning on this draft. However, when making my front cover I will make the central image stretch up to just beneath the masthead because at the top of the page there is a lot of empty space and in comparison to the text heavy bottom of the page it looks very boring and plain. 
Music Artist Profile
The music artist that I am using for my double page spread is called Tusk. They are a 4 piece rock band from Northamptonshire who formed at college in 2011.
The 4 members are:
- Evie Ablett – 17 – Lead vocals
- Jake Kerrou – 20 – Drums
- Ralph Major – 17 – Guitar and vocals
- Josh Law – 18 – Bass
All the band members are from small towns in Northamptonshire and met in 2011 when they started the music performance course at Northampton College. Evie and Ralph have always been interested in music and wanted to be involved in the industry from an early age whereas Jake and Josh were not interested in music until their early teenage years.
Jake and Evie have known each other since they were young children because they attended primary and secondary school together, even though Jake is older, Evie was best friends with his little sister. They then met Josh and Ralph when they both joined Northampton College in 2011 and the band was soon formed. Although they all played in other bands during their time at college, they continued to practice together as Tusk throughout.
The band made it big in summer 2012 when they were scouted at a local gig and then asked to go on a sell out arena tour as a support act for Biffy Clyro. Shortly after they released their debut album and it shot straight into the top 5. They are currently about to go on a 3 month tour themselves to promote their album.
Target Audience
The target audience for my music magazine is teenagers no younger than 14. I will address my audience by using models of a similar age and style as them so will know the magazine is aimed at them as soon as they look at it.
The audience will be predominantly middle class and they will come from normal families with a few siblings. They will still be in education but have a huge interest in music outside of school, maybe being in a band of their own. They are very particular about the bands and songs they like and can be very opinionated about whether a song is good or bad.
They will dress in dark clothes with fluorescent accessories such as headbands and belts and wear a lot of band merchandise, skinny jeans and large trainer shoes.
I have chosen this as my target audience because they are the kinds of people I spend time with and are into the same bands I am into so I have a good insight into what they would like to see on a magazine.
Music Magazine Genre
The genres of my music magazine are going to be rock\metal. I have chosen these genres because they are very popular amongst teenagers and young adults and the majority of the music I listen to fits into these genres. I think they are popular because there are many festivals and gigs that people can attend with their friends and have a good time listening to this music. There is also an appealing image which comes with this kind of music, people who are interested in this music wear a lot of band merchandise and have their own individual style, therefore it becomes more than just a music scene, it is a bit like a lifestyle.
The survey that I made on SurveyMonkey was filled out by some of my friends and as a general result I found that many of them like rock and metal music and enjoy reading magazines of both these genres.
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