Music Magazines in a shop

I went to my local corner shop and took images of the music magazines placed along the shelf. As you can see from left to right the featured genres are pop and rock. This tells me that locally, these are the most popular and most listened to genres because this shop lacked variety in music magazines. However the most well known magazines from these genres were on show, for example you can see NME and Top of the Pops magazine.

I have individual images of these magazines which I am going to analyse in further detail below.

This is Shout magazine, it is a pop magazine aimed at young teenage girls. This is clear from the colours and images used on the front cover - pink being a colour stereotypically associated with young girls. Also in the magazine there are make up bits and pieces.

This is a good way of getting the magazine to sell because young girls are so interested in their role models and they are always seeing them with make up on and looking really pretty, and it inspires them to be like them as much as possible. The magazine cover is also packed with lots of information about the content which is intriguing to the young audience, showing them that there is lots to read about, as well as getting the 'goodies'.



This is Top of the Pops magazine, another very popular and well known brand featured on the shelves of shops. Again, the target audience is young/teenage girls. This is obvious from the colours used throughout the cover. There is a consistent theme of pink and the fact that there is One Direction on the front shows an attractive image for young girls. This is also clear because of the layout of the magazine - it's not consistent and it being jumbled up attracts the readers' eye to every part of the magazine all at once which intrigues them to look inside.

Top of the Pops magazine also supply 'goodies' which, as I said above helps the magazine to sell. Some girls only buy the magazine for the 'goodies' inside but at the end of the day this doesn't matter for Top of the Pops because it helps and boosts their sales.


This is a music magazine featuring the genre of Rock. NME is a very popular and well known magazine to a lot of people and it has a target audience of mainly males. NME's main feature colour is red, this could represent the genre of rock because of the power it has, there is also yellow on the cover of this magazine to create a strong contrast to attract the audience and possible new readers.

This is obviously a special issue of NME as it features the 50 best albums and tracks of 2013. I like the idea of including a chart list with lots of information about different artists to keep the readers interested, and I think the more content you can get packed in, the better it is for the younger audiences who are easily distracted.



This is Rock magazine, a very popular music magazine for it's target audience of older men. It is clear that Rock magazine is targeted at older men because of the artists featured on the front. They're middle aged men and it reflects the target audience because older men are less likely to want to read a music magazine about younger rock bands/artists who are knew to the industry, they're going to want to read about there favourite bands/artists who they've grown up with.

This music magazine is very traditional looking with a straight forward and stereotypical layout, this again emphasises the target audience because older people don't need bright colours and interesting layouts to draw them in.

The white title against the black background creates a strong contrast. Even though black and white aren't bright colours they compliment each other where by they help the other one to stand out to the readers.





Overall the Top of the Pops magazine and the NME magazine have influenced me a lot and helped me to be a step closer to figuring out what my music magazine will look like. I like the idea this issue of NME magazine had, where they included a chart list and information about lots of different artists, and I also liked how the Top of the Pops magazine use lots of colours to reflect their target audience and include lots of intriguing snippets of the content on the cover.