Music Magazine Evaluation

Music magazine evaluation complete email from Joe Barron

Magazine Questionnaire

I made a questionnaire and handed it out to 20 different people in order to establish my target audience, and the pros and cons of my magazine from a range of different domographics.

The results of my questionnaire:

Does the magazine look as though it is of a high quality?
Yes: 16 No: 4

Would you say that the front cover image is interesting?
Yes: 13 No: 7

Would the contents of this magazine appeal to you?
Yes: 19 No: 1

Does the magazine present real media features?
Yes: 20 No: 0

Could you see it on the shelves?
Yes: 20 No: 0

Does the typography appeal to you?
Yes: 11 No: 9

Does the idea of a magazine being non-genre specific appeal to you?
Yes: 19 No: 1

Does the price of the magazine seem realistic?
Yes: 15 No: 5

As the consumer, are there any issues with this magazine?
Yes: 2 No: 18

The issues highlighted were merely just in regards to the double page spread, because the fonts used didn't particularly appeal to them; but this was only because of technological limitations in which I had obstructing me.

Double Page Spread

Contents Page - Updated

Double Page Spread - Research

Here, I am going to look at to double page spreads in a Q magazine, as I have established Q to be the magazine most similar to mine, and there are many elements of this magazine's double page spread that I would like to somewhat imitate.

There are two things that immediately draw the audience's attention when looking at this: that is the letters 'L' and 'J' in a big font and in red, which is the magazine's theme colour. Secondly, the main image which is clearly so important, it needs a whole page.

The images seem to take up a medium close-up, which suggests that the attention needs to be brought mainly to their faces, but also to other elements within the misc-en-scene which bare importance. I am going to take some inspiration from this, in the sense of using a whole side to portray the main image, however, I intend on perhaps doing a medium shot or even a long shot depending on the relevance of the misc-en-scene.

Something that I am very interested in using is the big letter. Looking at other magazines such as NME and Billboard, this idea of making the letter fill a whole page but with the main body of the spread coming out underneath seems to be something that only Q magazine does like this; so what I intend to do is, because my double page spread is going to be on Ed Sheeran, who is well known for having ginger hair, I am going to focus the main image on that colour and on his hair, and then have the first letter of the main body be much larger than the rest and have it the same colour of his hair, to emphasis it and to also add some humor to it, as you will see by the quotation that has been put onto the main image of the Jay-Z article that humor comes out a lot, which is what I have also done for my front cover.

The topics of the main body seem to talk about various things about the artists' career, so I am going to select a few things such as Sheeran's new album, how he became known, what he is working on, and then things such as who he would like to work with in the future and who he has worked with before,

I think then I would need to merely keep to conventions such as a title at the top of the double page spread to introduce the artist, page numbers and decorative lines to keep it neat and tidy. Furthermore, in terms of tidyness, the typography should clearly be going towards the Times New Roman font to show class and prestige rather than going back to Comic Sans and losing the magazine's credibility, as I want my magazine to be a high-end magazine with a target audience of music lovers across the gender spectrum from 18+.