How did you attract/address your audience?

With this front page, I attempted to be as open and inviting to my audience as I could, incorporating several features from existing music magazine covers, and using those designs as a starting point to expand on my own ideas, hoping for there to be a sense of familiarity between my work and the existing publications. Thus I had the title of the magazine running in a banner across the top of the page, much like the KERRANG! and Metal Hammer issues I analysed previously in my blog did, and included the band who would be the focus of the double page spread on the cover.

In my title design, I decided to include an image which is considered ‘famous’ amongst the rock/metal music crowd – the anarchy symbol, which has been a frequently recognised image, particularly since the days of punk music, etc. In a sense this would insinuate that the audience is expected to at least be familiar with this image, however as it is a world-famous symbol, I felt that it would be easily accessible to even new fans, and those who would not ever typically read a magazine of this genre.

In this piece, though I do not feel that the audience is addressed in many ways, I do feel that I present my magazine as expecting an audience who is as concerned with the music the bands produce as with the bands themselves, which, in my opinion, many other magazines fail to do. This can be seen in the contents page designs and double page spread articles of magazines such as KERRANG or Metal Hammer, who seem to focus more upon the band and band members than the music, which seems unusual, considering that the genre of the magazine is ‘music’.

Through my studies of other music magazine articles, I realised that the majority of articles seem to focus more upon the band’s personal lives rather than their actual music, which tends to have much less of a focus in the extracts. For example, in the article I analysed, regarding the band ‘The All American Rejects’ – the majority of the paragraphs focussed on the band’s personal lives, particularly that of the lead singer, and even when discussing the band’s music, the subject was quickly returned to focus upon the members of the band themselves.



(The extract above is an example of this.)

Realising that this must be due to the interests of the audience, I chose to write my article in a similar style, attempting to give even new audiences an account of this band so that they might find the group more accessible as they know their roots, motivations, etc. Thus, the majority of my article focussed upon the personal lives of my band, how they formed, their problems on their road to fame and other subjects I hoped the typical rock/metal magazine audiences would appreciate.