Summary of Research into Existing Magazines

I have been researching into existing magazines of my chosen style of genre, which is acoustic. Because of the small market in acoustic magazines I was only able to find one magazine appropriate for annalysing. This magazine was 'ACOUSTIC' and is the UK's only magazine dedicated to acoustic guitars and music.

I found that in all magazine's there is a style and image that runs through out the magazine, which fits with the type of magazine. This is done so as to attract the right kind of audience and draw in readers. If a magazine was attracting radicals then they would use people in the magazine who had an alternative style of dress and not some one who wore fashionable clothing.

Just like if you were creating a classical music magazine then you wouldn't photograph the musicians wearing a tracksuit or jeans. Instead you would dress them in smart and almost formal clothing.

This is a picture out of the magazine 'ACOUSTIC.' The image works well in this magazine because it dennotes a young artist playing in what appears to be a small venue. This couldn't be used in a magazine such as 'New Musical Express' because 'Flo Rowland' the artist in the picture isn't a global selling artist and pictures such as this are not included in such as well known and popular magazine as 'NME.' So including the right stlye of images in a magazine is very important. This includes how you photograph objects, dress people and where you photograph them and any effects you use.

Chosing the right colour scheme in the magazine is important aswell. In a classical magazine you would use mainly white colours, which would conote pureness and innocence, which fits well with the style of music. A serif font may also be used to conote class. In a rock magazine you would find dark atmospheric colours and fonts such as this :

I found that when annalysing the magazine 'ACOUSTIC' the font used was quite simple and plain as were the colours used not only in the text but through out the magazine. They veered away from the use of bright colours and instead stuck to more natural looking colours such as brown, red, green and blue. The colours worked well with the photographs which were mainly focused around nature, so it seemed quite fitting to use colours found in nature. Like green for grass, blue for fields and brown for tree's, which went well with the guitar bodies which were photographed against tree trunks.

I also noticed that there were lots of advertisements included in the magazine. A mimimun of one per page. Because the magazine aims to attract musicians of an acoustic style who play guitar, incorporating the sales and advertisement of guitars worked well.

I feel that this research was important as I have now looked closely into different genres of music magazines and studied even closer what an acoustic magazine's main features are. Now with my research that I have carried out I can go on to use some of these idea's in my own magazine I will be creating. Without this research I would not of been able to create a magazine suitable for my chosen genre, acoustic.

Because of the gap in the market I plan to challenge the conventions by not just limitting the audience to a guitar based one, as the magazine 'ACOUSTIC' did which I based most of my research on. But instead I plan to open up the audience by including a wider range of acoustic instruments such as cello and violin and possibly stretch to a more folky style of music, which still fits into the acoustic category. I aim to still attract radicals, as most folk musicians tend to have a bohemian style of dress and using the colours which fit with nature would still work well. I think that you could gain more of an audience for acoustic magazines if you broadend the audience you were aiming to targett. Also the folk scene is growing and is becoming something quite interesting and exciting and more younger people are getting increasingly more interested in folk. So I think that it could work well.