Plan Of Action

After deciding that making a music magazine was the route I was going to take I then had to decide what genre of music I would set my magazine around; after doing some research on magazine sales it became apparent that mainly rock/indie magazines succeed long term in the music magazine market.

Classic Rock 70,188 (66,632 / 67,399)

Kerrang! 52,272 (60,294 / 76,937)

Metal Hammer 50,269 (48,540 / 45,809)

Mixmag 30,159 (34,073 / 35,817)

Mojo 100,507 (106,367 / 106,218)

NME 48,459 (56,284 / 64,033)

Q 103,017 (113,174 / 131,330)

Rock Sound 20,011 (22,527 / 23,021)

Terrorizer 13,786 (14,952)

Uncut 87,069 (86,925 / 91,028)

Word 34,280 (33,775 / 33,217)

However, due to existing competition I feel that there is little room for just another standard rock magazine in the market; readers will not be interested in looking at another magazine if it was just be the same. It would be hard to get dedicated readers to stop buying their regular magazines and change to mine with no particular enticement.

I want to target my magazine at people between the age range of 16-24. I am going to design a questionnaire to give to a random sample of 50 people around that age. The questionare will allow me to get an idea of what my target audience wants to read about and what cover stories would be best suited to attract the readers; in turn this will then enable me to produce a music magazine that includes everything that my target audience would be interested in, in one package.

Questionnaire:

I will have to make sure that my questionnaire provides a degree of personal information about the people. Age and gender will be important information to collect to access which age group and gender to target the magazine towards. (i.e. If it's only boys that would be interested in my magazine then I will target my magazine to boys.)

I also need to know what genre of music my target audience are interested in as well, so that I can choose a successful genre. Asking the actual question 'do they read music magazines?' would be crucial because if no one ticks 'yes' then it wouldn't be a good idea to target my magazine at people that aren't even interested in reading music magazines. On the other hand asking why they don't would also be a good idea because they might not read any music magazines because at the moment they just aren't interesting enough to them.

Finding out where people of this age group look to find out music news would be good; whether they go online, read magazines or just watch music channels such as MTV. I would then be able to adapt my magazine to fit their general interests; i.e. if they go online then making a website for my magazine might become a viable option.

By obtaining a knowledge of which radio station they listen to would also be constructive. When I find this out I can listen to that radio station and make myself familiar to the style of this radio station; and add some of these ideas as features of my magazine.

I will directly ask the target audience what they would like to see in a new music magazine; and this will help to ensure I include content in my magazine that appeals to my audience.