Magazine Cover Reaserch

A key part of a music magazine is its genre, as this determines the magazines target audience, which in turn determines everything from the magazines presentation to the focus of its articles. Therefore I will analyse serveral extracts from various diffrent music magazines of diffrent genres.
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This is the cover for the magazine 'Kerrang!'. The front cover contains a reasonable ammount of information about the inside contents but without being cluttered. The cover has a plain white background with the image of the featured band taking up the majority of the cover. The other articles in the magazine are listed along the bottom and side. Due to this it appears that thisnmagazine is more focused on contents than asthetics.



This cover is for the Rolling Stones which in terms of genre is broader than kerrang. Similar to kerrangs cover, there is no background image, but what is most striking about this cover is that 90% of the page is taken up by the image of the featured artist, Rihanna, so musch so that the image is even covering up part of the magazines title. The other featured articles are listed down the side however they are not accompanied by pictures, as if not to draw away from the main image. Because of how dominant the image is over the rest of the cover, its safe to assume that the magazine is banking on the regognisability of the featured artist, which may be due to Rolling Stones target audience.



This cover for NME (which focuses on the indie rock genre) finds itself inbetween kerreng and Rolling Stone in terms of how tidily the content is laid out. The main image, again takes priority (which we can now assume is a convention of all music magazines) with other articles scattered around and the only other pictures tucked away in the top right corner as well as a lone small plug in the top left corner, implying that while these do have a place on the front cover, they should in no way take away from the main image. The magazine name, main title and sub-titles are all conviniently coulor coded in red, blue and yellow making the front cover easier to glance over.