During the research I discovered more about genre specific magazines and multi-genre magazines. Popular magazines like Q and NME feature many different genres in their magazine, from mainstream pop to rock. However there are many other magazines like Acoustic and Mojo which are genre specific.
My Target Audience:
I see my target audience as being mostly female due to the fact that the group I'm promoting are all girls. However they are not your stereotypical pop orientated girl group, they have an alternative style, which could be appealing to boys too. My target audience can be as broad as people who like to discover new alternative music, or as specific as teenage girls who aren't into
Magazines which wouldn't fit my artist:
1. Kerrang
Kerrang is an example of a genre specific magazine. Its focus is primarily on rock, a genre which my artist isn't usually associated with. Its the sort of magazine which need the artists in it to be fully committed to the genre of the magazine, making it completely unsuitable for my advertisement.
2. We Love Pop!
We Love Pop! is not a million miles away from my bands genre. However, pop implies that the music contained in it will all be mainstream, and my artist is currently seen as 'up-and-coming' and not yet mainstream. This means that it would do neither the band or the magazine any favours having an ad in this magazine. The readers of the magazine wouldn't respond to it, and my target audience wouldn't see it as they definitely wouldn't read this particular magazine.
This magazine is clearly more about keeping up to date about established artists, and shows no interest in introducing its readers to new undiscovered artists. It also focusses less on actual music, and more the context in which its created.
Magazine which would fit my artist:
1. Q
Q is a multi genre magazine, meaning that they don't focus on one specific type of music, leaving the door open for it to contain music from many different artists. One of the things it looks at heavily is new artists. This fits my artist perfectly, because we are advertising a song from their debut album, and they are currently battling to get into the top 40.
By looking at these examples of advertisements I can spot a few of the same themes running through them. One thing I noticed by looking through a lot of them is that not all of them feature the artist, which is a technique I will probably use. Jay-Z's one just features an iconic memorable image.
I struggled to find one which didn't contain the artist's name and the title of the album/song it was promoting. This is a fairly critical feature which I need to include in my own advertisement.
The rest of the conventions seem to only appear on certain advertisements and not all of them. Things like tour dates, hit singles from the album, websites, shops where you can buy the album, reviews, awards, release dates, people featuring on songs from the album and record labels.
In terms of the design of the advertisements, they all seem to stay very close to the theme of the album which it accompanies. This is something I need to keep in mind when it comes to making my album cover too, because it needs to be obvious which album the advertisement is promoting before even reading anything, as is the case with the ones I came across.
The artist's name in these advertisements is always central, and only not in the middle on Jay-Z's one. One thing I also notice is that the album title is always second to the artist, both in size and placement. This tells me that the advertisement is mainly selling the artist first, meaning that image or interpretation of them is crucial. The focus is less on the music and more on the image.
Analysing Existing Advertisements
Choosing My Magazine
The magazine which I choose to advertise in has to match my bands target audience, things like readership age and popularity.
Q was my initial thought for a music magazine to advertise with. They are a multi genre magazine, which is perfect for my artists as their music can't really be pigeon holed easily. Upon further research into the magazine I discovered that the average age for readers of the magazine was 32, which seemed too high for my artist. On the same page however, Q claims that it's audience are "younger and more affluent" than any other music magazine.
On their website I found this table:
These statistics reassured me, with 15-24 year olds being the most popular age bracket for readers of Q. This means that 133,835 of people reading Q are in the same age bracket as my target audience.
The gender ration is quite male heavy, and in my initial research I identified my ideal target audience member to be female. I don't think this should be a problem, because from my research I found out that most music magazines have a male heavy audience. Also, the music from my artist is by no means exclusive to women.
70% of the readers of Q are in the ABC1 profile, meaning that the majority of readers will presumably be open to the prospect of buying an album they like the look of in the magazine.
First Photoshop Attempt
Testing Fonts
My Target Audience:
I see my target audience as being mostly female due to the fact that the group I'm promoting are all girls. However they are not your stereotypical pop orientated girl group, they have an alternative style, which could be appealing to boys too. My target audience can be as broad as people who like to discover new alternative music, or as specific as teenage girls who aren't into
Magazines which wouldn't fit my artist:
1. Kerrang
Kerrang is an example of a genre specific magazine. Its focus is primarily on rock, a genre which my artist isn't usually associated with. Its the sort of magazine which need the artists in it to be fully committed to the genre of the magazine, making it completely unsuitable for my advertisement.
2. We Love Pop!
We Love Pop! is not a million miles away from my bands genre. However, pop implies that the music contained in it will all be mainstream, and my artist is currently seen as 'up-and-coming' and not yet mainstream. This means that it would do neither the band or the magazine any favours having an ad in this magazine. The readers of the magazine wouldn't respond to it, and my target audience wouldn't see it as they definitely wouldn't read this particular magazine.
This magazine is clearly more about keeping up to date about established artists, and shows no interest in introducing its readers to new undiscovered artists. It also focusses less on actual music, and more the context in which its created.
Magazine which would fit my artist:
1. Q
Q is a multi genre magazine, meaning that they don't focus on one specific type of music, leaving the door open for it to contain music from many different artists. One of the things it looks at heavily is new artists. This fits my artist perfectly, because we are advertising a song from their debut album, and they are currently battling to get into the top 40.
I think that the majority of the target audience for the album will be subscribers to Q, if not another magazine which features up-and-coming artists. If not that, then they definitely do regular internet searches and surely come across the website for Q magazine.
In terms of sales, they are down, as are many other UK music magazines. Its a declining industry, but Q is still one of the top sellers in the UK.
Music Magazine Advertisement Conventions
In order to gain ideas for my own music advertisement I decided to look at some of the conventions of typical advertisements in music magazines.
Here are some I found:
By looking at these examples of advertisements I can spot a few of the same themes running through them. One thing I noticed by looking through a lot of them is that not all of them feature the artist, which is a technique I will probably use. Jay-Z's one just features an iconic memorable image.
I struggled to find one which didn't contain the artist's name and the title of the album/song it was promoting. This is a fairly critical feature which I need to include in my own advertisement.
The rest of the conventions seem to only appear on certain advertisements and not all of them. Things like tour dates, hit singles from the album, websites, shops where you can buy the album, reviews, awards, release dates, people featuring on songs from the album and record labels.
In terms of the design of the advertisements, they all seem to stay very close to the theme of the album which it accompanies. This is something I need to keep in mind when it comes to making my album cover too, because it needs to be obvious which album the advertisement is promoting before even reading anything, as is the case with the ones I came across.
The artist's name in these advertisements is always central, and only not in the middle on Jay-Z's one. One thing I also notice is that the album title is always second to the artist, both in size and placement. This tells me that the advertisement is mainly selling the artist first, meaning that image or interpretation of them is crucial. The focus is less on the music and more on the image.
Analysing Existing Advertisements
Choosing My Magazine
The magazine which I choose to advertise in has to match my bands target audience, things like readership age and popularity.
Q was my initial thought for a music magazine to advertise with. They are a multi genre magazine, which is perfect for my artists as their music can't really be pigeon holed easily. Upon further research into the magazine I discovered that the average age for readers of the magazine was 32, which seemed too high for my artist. On the same page however, Q claims that it's audience are "younger and more affluent" than any other music magazine.
On their website I found this table:
These statistics reassured me, with 15-24 year olds being the most popular age bracket for readers of Q. This means that 133,835 of people reading Q are in the same age bracket as my target audience.
The gender ration is quite male heavy, and in my initial research I identified my ideal target audience member to be female. I don't think this should be a problem, because from my research I found out that most music magazines have a male heavy audience. Also, the music from my artist is by no means exclusive to women.
70% of the readers of Q are in the ABC1 profile, meaning that the majority of readers will presumably be open to the prospect of buying an album they like the look of in the magazine.
First Photoshop Attempt
I participated in a lesson in order to teach me how to use photoshop, as previously I had next to no knowledge about how to use it. I had to find a single image of my chosen artist and edit that for my first try.
The image I created is the same size as what my magazine advertisement will be. I didn't add any additional text which I might want to add when it comes to creating my real advertisement, but I think what I've created still gives the impression of a magazine ad.
I didn't use too many of photoshop's features to create this first image, but I did edit the hue and saturation of the image to make it a bit more blue in its theme colour, with an element of green too.
The text is a similar colour to the background which it features on, but I think this is quite an effective technique. The colour used was taken from the original image using the eye dropper tool.
Despite this being an image just to help learn the basics of photoshop, I think that the font I used and the colour scheme work well and I will definitely trial using them on my main one.
Testing Fonts
For this one I went with a more red theme for the main image, and I thought that a more sophisticated font would match this colour more than the simple one used before.
Using Photoshop
I decided to familiarise myself with Photoshop by using some text tutorials online. This would help me to learn some new effects to use and maybe even discover a font which id like to use on my own magazine advertisement.
I found this website: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/80-best-photoshop-text-effects-tutorials-part-iii/
This was the design I decided to try out. I think it seems simplistic and quite arty, which the genre of music my band are, is associated with:
I started off by choosing this font as it matched the example the best:
I then downloaded some brushes from the internet and brought them into photoshop:
I then played with these new brushes and tried to replicate the example given. This is what the end result looked like:
The main thing I will take away from this practise session is the fact that I can download brushes from the internet. I think this could prove ver useful when it comes to coming up with a creative magazine advertisement.
Constructing My Magazine Advertisement
By completing my CD digipak, I am now aware of what style I want my mag ad to be in, because I want it to reflect the digipak as much as possible, to create a link.
These are some of the effects I created and shortlisted with the original image:
I created a layer which distorts an image to look like a reflection:
This matched the theme of the image already, it just adds a different effect to it, as the reflection is more dominant when its edited on.
I also added a blur to the image, as in my digipak, because I think the text looks more crisp when its set on a slightly blurred backdrop.
'Don't Save Me' Jake Hughes Completed Music Magazine Advertisement:
