Further target audience research

Further target audience research

Transcript for focus group:

E- how do you distinguish the differences between different genres of magazines?

K- well firstly I would look at the main image because that gives away what style of music the company would like to show to their audience and I feel like by the colours, if it was a pop magazine it would have bright colours such as pink and blue. Whereas if it was a jazz magazine, it would have more darker colours like a smoky colour effect. Overall, I feel like the main image would give the genre away to the audience.

H- you are able to like choose and decide what genre it fits, so the techniques that are used, so like if it’s intense by the person looking directly out to there, the reader would look straight t them, then it just seems more intense so like a rock or hard core genre.

H- what features would you expect to see on the front of a magazine?

E- um I feel like you would expect a masthead for sure because that’s like one of the main parts of a magazine cover, as it lets you know like the company, the brand, the logo and everything and things like that. Also, the anchorage text links in with that because it gives you like information about what’s gonna be in the magazine and everything like that. Um another main feature is obviously the main image, and the secondary image because that gives you a visual view of what’ gonna be in the magazine and what to expect and yeah I think that most attention is directed towards the images as well.

K- I’d also say that the cover lines were a main feature of the magazine because it gives the reader an insight to what articles are about inside the magazine. Also, banners are quite good because they’re really eye-catching, so the moment the reader see’s the banner, they’ll know if they want to read it or not and that’s similar to like puffs and buzzwords because they’ll be attracted to the magazine and would want to read it.

K- what types of articles would you be interested in reading within a music magazine?

H- personally I’d like to read information on who they actually are, I think it would be good for an audience and a fan of this individual to see how they feel about certain topics and actually get to know them. Interviews would be useful because you actually will be able to read their personal answers to the questions and how they feel.

E- yeah I agree with the interview aspect because it’s like you’re actually hearing it from the person rather than like different articles and stuff when they don’t actually get them from the right source, I think that’s quite interesting and um regarding the question, I kind of like to see when they’re touring and future release dates of their albums and stuff, because I feel like that’s quite important information to know if you really like the band or the artist.

E- what colours would be most aesthetically pleasing for a specific genre for a magazine cover?

K- well for my magazine I’m doing jazz so I feel like it’d be darker and more subtle colours, like grey, black and white would work and they would recognise this as a jazz magazine from those colours and I’d possibly use a brighter colour to highlight important aspects of the magazine. It wouldn’t be too out there but it would grab the reader’s attention. Whereas a pop magazine you would have those brighter colours like blue, red and pink because that would just let the reader know that this is more of a fun magazine targeted at a younger audience.

H- yeah for my magazine I’m doing rock and we tend to use a range of different colours including a contrast between the background and the main image because many of the people who are musicians in this specific genre, they tend to wear darker clothing and so brighter colours for the background wold be better to use.  There are also like different variations of the rock genre such as indie rock, pop rock, punk pop which is a similar style and alternative, these all link together to make it visually pleasing for the reader.

H- what instruments are suitable for certain genres?

E- I think especially for rock magazines, um like alternative rock there’s a lot more, electric guitar, bass um microphones, drums because you kinda get like that sound like um projected through the instruments on the magazine so yeah, I feel like there’s a lot more instruments in there.

K- I’d say for like a jazz magazine, more brass instruments such as trumpets or saxophones would be used, possibly bass and drums just so it gives the reader the feel of a whole band playing in the magazine.

E- I feel like there’s a lot of similar instruments like no matter what the genre of music is.

K- yeah, I just feel like between jazz and rock the trumpets and saxophones would distinguish that difference between them.