Content Analysis and Target Audience

Recently i have been analysing the content of popular music magazines NME and KERRANG! We have been looking into target audience which is split into demographics and psychographics. Demographics is where you study the hobbies, interests, culture, race, gender etc. 

Psychographics is where you study the way your audience thinks. 

 Inside the magazines we have studied the use of advertising and if the adverts are suitable for the target audience of the magazine.

Demographics is where you study the hobbies, interests, culture, race, gender etc. of your target audience.

Psychographics is where you study the way your audience thinks.

NME is a popular music magazine. based on the research done on NME (focusing on advertising, features, psychographics and demographics)  NMEs key demographic are specifically inner city males from the ages of 16-24 interested in music and forming/helping to create 'original' music and bands. You can tell this as most weeks there are male icons on the front cover, re-enforcing a male dominance throughout its demographic. Readers will have to have a large spending bracket as buying NME every week for a year will add up to £119.11. Throughout the magazine there is constant theme when it comes to advertising; video games has a 4 page spread even before the contents page. Collectively there is roughly 22 1/2 pages dedicated to tour dates with the remaining space being taken up with adverts for recording studios and other various musical and technology based products. In the particular issue i looked at NMEs features range from music festival reviews and updates to a double page spread on unknown and possibly unsigned bands in Manchester, this feature in particular connects with a majority of NMEs readers who themselves might be in a band or looking for ways to 'make it'.

There are some similarities between the demographics of KERRANG! and NME. KERRANG! has a slightly older demographic, which will be due to the fact that it's masthead font is striking and the colour theme is quite dark and a younger group of children are drawn to the brighter colours and 'lighter' sounding music the NME promotes. KERRANG! readers would be between the ages of 16-30 again predominately male. Advertising is similar in both. However, there seems to be more adverts for band merchandise then NME. This is because their readership are into rock and metal music, this group of people are very proud of the bands they like and choose to wear their band logos on clothes not just in concerts but during the day. This in itself acts as ''free'' advertising for the band. KERRANG! contains more adverts for band auditions. The rest of the adverts between the two magazines don't tend to differ much; HMV adverts for their latest deals can be found in both publications.