In today's lesson we did some research on music magazines. We were each given a music magazine at random and had to do a powerpoint answering the following questions:
What are the latest ABC figures?
What are the target audience?
Is the music magazine owned privately or by a large company?
And then we had to do a brief textual analysis of the front cover.
Some reaserch into Q magazine. Q is a music magazine published monthly in the UK with an average of 80,418 copies sold per issue. Q was first publiched in October 1986, setting itslef aside from other music magazines with its monthly production and high standards of photography and printing. Originally it was going to be called Cue but it was changed to Q as the publishers (Bauer Media Group) thought that it may have got mistaken for a snooker magazine.Q's current editor is Paul Rees. Q's content includes extensive review sections featuring new releases of music, film and live concert reviews as well as radio and television reviews. Q also features approximately eight album advertisements which it classes as the best new releases of the past three months. most of the magazine is devoted to interviews with popular artists. The magazine often gives promotional gifts such as CD's and books. Usual features include Q50, where it lists 50 essential tracks of the month and Cash for questions where a famous celebrity answers questions sent in by readers. The magazine is closely linked with Glastonbury festival, producing a free daily newspaper on site during the festival.
http://www.qthemusic.com/ This is the link to Q magazines official website
Textual Analysis of album advertisments from my chossen magazine.
This is Coldplay's advertisment for the new and upcoming album MYLO XYLOTO.
The main theme of this album advertisement is graffiti. I know this because the whole background is graffiti. The three main colours that stand out for me are pink,orange and blue. These colour's make the advertisement bold, bright and ultimately make it stand out from the crowd. This particular advertisement is situated on the back page of Q magazine. I did some research into how much it costs to put an advertisement in this position and it was around £11,000, this just proves that this is a prime spot which gets a lot of attention and is a good place to advertise an album. On the page over the top of the graffiti we have bold white bubble writing at the top is the bands name 'Coldplay' this is obviously on here so that people know who's album it is. The album title is then in the middle of the page in the same writing as the bands name but the size is much larger. This is because they want to draw attention to the album they are trying to promote.Underneith this is the release date October 24th, so they have got there advertisment out in plenty of time for people to pre-order it. At the bottom I can see they tell us where to buy there album from itunes. They put this on here so that we know where to get it.
This advertisment has a picture of the artist Florence on the centre of the page. The picture is like a mirror effect of her hugging herself with her eyes closed, she looks like she's dreaming. The background is black, i think they may have used black because the only real colour in the advertisment is orange which is the orange of her hair. I think they may have done this to make her hair stand out as this is one of her key features that represents her as an artist. So people will see her ginger hair and automatically think it's Florence and the machine. The only writing on the page is the artists name, the name of the album and the release date. They have kept information minimal because they want to get the key facts accross that are important. They have used two types of font on the page Florence and the machine is in one font and the album name and release dat is in another. This allows readers to quickly identify that the date is relating to the album and not the artists tour or something else.
This advertisment has more information on then any of the others i have looked at. The main colour scheme for it is green, in the background there is a picture that looks like a ceiling with lights but it also looks like a plane bottom which would explain the title high flying birds. In the front of the advertisement is a picture of Noel Gallagher with his arms crossed with a fierce face staring directly at the camera. It makes me think that this artist means buisness and he really wants you to buy his album. At the bottom of the page in white writing is information like debut album out 17th October, song names and also his official website. This information informs us a bit more on what we can expect from the album as it gives us some of the singles from the album. In the bottom left hand corner is also a barcode scan thing that can be used by an iphone or smart phone to acces exclusive content. This may gain some more readers as its new and can give them more information on the debut album of Noel Gallagher.
