Music Magazine: NMEBy Lewis & Leanne

Analysing Magazine Conventions

These are all magazine covers made by NME. As you can see that use similar fonts with the logo being placed at the top left hand of the cover, but the magazines also have very similar layout in which one image (Often of the main artist featured in the magazine with angle on gaze) takes up the majority of the magazine and the rest is pretty much text. In terms of teasers and so on the magazine doesn't include many of these but that's mainly to do with text placement and that the artist featured are the main focus rather than the content the magazine has like interviews and so on. Finally the colour scheme is also very similar in the sense that each cover consists of ether red white or blue text.

Text colour consist of mainly red, white and blue

Angle on gaze focusing on the reader

Logo in the top left hand corner

Font styles are very similar

One image takes up the most of the cover

Use of Cut-Out

Main Audience

Based on the NME cover magazine and the artist they feature we assumed that their main target audience is young adults.

This is because the front covers of their magazine certainly got our attention with artist like Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay and so on. But we soon realised that most of the artist they feature are rock artists most of which we have never heard of like Beady Eye, Kasabian, Wild Beasts etc.

This magazine didn’t feature many popular artist like Katy Perry, Tinie Tempah, JLS and so on which is what most young adults are in to. Occasionally they will features artist like Willow Smith and Cee Lo Green to expand their audience and make the magazine a lot more varied.

It’s use of language is also more adult because as we read through and article we noticed drugs being mentioned and they used words like “In a world drowning in musical disinformation we're shit–shovelling Vikings”.

Magazine salesOn average NME have around 369,000

readers and sell about 38,486 units per year making around £96,215 through magazines sales (magazine prices are £2.50 on average).

Recent statistics have shown that the overall NME magazine sales have dropped by a least 20% in the last year which is mostly likely due to having several online pages that feature most of the information in the magazine (e.g. Their own website, Facebook, Twitter etc).

NME’s main method off attracting audiences is to advertise themselves on the internet through websites like their very own blog, Facebook, Twitter and so on.

They also attract audiences by having big name artist/bands like Coldplay and Arctic Monkeys featured on the front cover of their magazines but this can also be used to satisfy their audiences since they have these types of artist/bands in most issues.

They have the magazine available to download onto your computer or iPad which may benefit those who don’t want to purchase or cannot find the actually magazine, they also have a service called RSS feed which is their way of letting you know about the latest magazine previews via Email which keeps their audiences update on what’s going on.

NME also do various special offers which can both satisfy and attract their audiences for example “Subscribe to NME and save up to £84”

Attracting and Satisfying their audience

OWNER AND DISTRIBUTOR OF NME MAGAZINE NME is technically owned by Time Warner but

the person behind NME is Steve Sutherland (although the original owner was Maurice Kinn until he died in the year 2000).

NME distribute their magazine in stores by themselves since 2002 but in 2009 they teamed up with John Menzies so that they can distribute their magazine online.

The magazines are sold at most supermarkets like Tesco, Sainsbury and so on as well as news agents and other places like WHSmiths, the online magazine is variable to download Zinio Digital magazines.com and is available on iPad apps store.

Developing NME magazine through technology NME originally started out as a published newspapers

back in 1952 but as time went on and technology rapidly developed they were able to create their own magazine thanks to image-editing programmes like Photoshop to create their magazine covers as well as advancements in industrial machinery and so on.

Also thanks to the internet, not only were NME able to create and publish there magazine online but they were also able to advertise themselves on websites like Facebook, Twitter and so on. It is also it was much easier for them to obtain information necessary for certain magazine articles (e.g. all the songs a band/artist have produced or obtaining contact details).

DO THEY HAVE AN ONLINE VERSION?

Yes. NME do have an online magazine. The magazine is available to download online but is also available on the iPad apps store which makes the online version much more accessible. When comparing the hard copy magazine to the newspaper the actual content is pretty much the same thing (in the sense that they have the same articles) the only major differences is that the online version (£1.75) is much cheaper than the hard copy (£2.30) and that some times the hard copy magazines offer special like CD’s and other types of merchandise.

Thanks For Watching :D