Methods of Research

An important part of creating a music magazine is to have a target audience, but firstly you have to find out who your target audience are you have to find out the size of the target audience, their likes and dislikes and other stuff concerning the audience. The two methods of research that I will be using are:-

Quantitative Data Research: (Examples of this include surveys and questionnaires) used to be able to measure and predict a result in order to perform a final conclusion.

Qualitative Data Research: (Examples include Diary account) Qualitative date is all about answering questions with more personal opinions involved.

There is two different types of data that is typically collected from these two research strategies, these are:

Primary Research: Data that is specifically created to answer a specific question, an example of this is conducting a study as to what weather people enjoy the most and asking ten different random people about their favourite weather then recording their answer.

Secondary Research: Data that has been recorded by others but has been transferred into relativity in your questionnaire an example of this is finding out that a survey in magazine said that 50% of people like a certain weather type over another weather type and recording that statistic and keeping it within your results

But why is this necessary, and how can it benefit a music magazine?

The data that will be recorded is necessary as it means that media consumers will get the most out of a piece of media based on their own opinions. People in media may not like something but don't like complaining so they just carry on either suffering or without, when a questionnaire is taken more peoples opinions are taken into account and certain things are done to help benefit a piece of media to an audience's preference such as conducting a study into "what colour people would be more likely to buy a magazine in?" If this question was answered truthfully by an audience then the media institution conducting the survey may see an increase in magazine sales, as they will have taken the audience's opinions into account.

What is a Music Magazine?

A music magazine by its web based definition is "A music magazine is a magazine dedicated to music and music culture. Such magazines typically include music news, interviews, photo shoots, essays, record reviews, concert reviews and occasionally have a covermount with recorded music." Although this definition is correct its just one opinion of what a music magazine is, a music magazine to me is a last line of the physical form of music that people are still interested in, social media and on-line downloading have erased virtually every physical form of media within music, but music magazines are still standing and people continue to buy them, people prefer music magazines as they are seen to be more truthful compared to websites on-line which means that some people think music should be kept in its original form and I agree, a music magazine is a romantic style text full of truth and passion of people who want to keep physicality of music alive and not let social media keep its grip on reality.

A music magazine contains many elements to it these include:
Images
Interviews
Tour Dates
Reviews
Band information

All these the main elements that music magazines are bought for, these all make up key aspects that make up a music magazine, music magazines popularity now is laughable compared to its height especially for NME as they were arguably the biggest and best know music magazine from 1975-1982 where it was averaging 300,000+ plus from January to June compared to just march 2011 to June 2012 where it received just 289,000 this is a  huge drop even compared to the times of then and now as this was recorded for over a year.

The oldest music magazine in Britain is BMG Magazine, it was first created in 1906 and revolved around the acoustic genre (guitar and voice). 
The most popular music magazine in the UK however is is FLY which had a circulation of 106,586 when its figures where last recorded.
The magazine with the highest recorded circulation figures is The Rolling Stone which has an enormous circulation of 1,464,943 worldwide.

Many music magazines tend to focus on either one or few music genres to appeal to a certain target audience an example of this is NME(New Musical Express) who's target audience is Rock, Alternative, and Pop this shows that they focus on just a few genres to make sure their target audience is focused on certain groups of people rather than trying to make it appeal to everybody. Other magazines will focus on other groups of people they do this as if a music or any type of magazine tried to create a magazine with every genre it would not work pure and simply as too much detail would go into it and not enough detail would be created for each genre plus the magazine would have to be huge and hundreds more jobs would be needed to compensate for knowledge and background on each genre.

The future of music magazines doesn't look too good, but it doesn't look too bad as it has a steady of dedicated fans who look to magazines as their source of enjoyment and pleasure, one day not too soon into the future, magazines will become obsolete and I think it will be replaced by higher forms of technology such as the tablet but on a smaller scale. This does not say that sales will drop as new formats could rapidly improve sales if they are sold at a cost but at this moment in time music magazines are still standing and are still selling.

Introduction

My name is Joel Lampkin and here on this blog you will find my coursework for AS media, in this project I will be creating a Music Magazine. This blog will act as a diary full of posts linked with my magazine such as Magazine reviews, Music video reviews, Screenshots of my progress and other posts that can get me to a higher grade throughout this project. The immediate impression and foundation I imagined for this project was to visit a shop and purchase about 3-4 music magazines and compare them to see what actually needs to be included in my own. By doing this I will have a basic understanding of what I need to do such as taking photographs of people to include in my band and do research into the correct terminology of magazines to make this blog seem more professional.

About me

I am aged 17, and like nearly everybody in the world I am a music fan, my music preferences often vary as I enjoy a large range of music from different genres. If i had to pick a favourite genre or genres they would have to be Indie music, bands like The Imagine Dragons, The 1975 and Ed Sheeran really appeal to me as their music is not loud or pointless and make

s me and others feel happy, the type of music of the artists above is very soft music and I like it purely because the songs sound good with the certain tones used, regardless of the meanings behind them. Ed Sheeran is the most original out of the three and he really appeals to me as an artist because he seems very down to earth and the way he sings his songs is like something I've've never heard before, he sings in a metaphor style making the audience think about his lyrics rather than just the sound of the music. I don't tend to take very much notice into the world of music magazines as I prefer reading about my favourite artists on-line, via social media such as Twitter or Facebook as I think its more appealing and socially viable rather than spending at least £3 on a music magazine each week. I appreciate the scale of the effort that is incorporated into a music magazine or any magazine for that  matter but I just believe that there are better ways of reading a magazine rather than in its physical form.