The document analyzes various music magazine genres, including pop, rock, R'n'B, and hip-hop, highlighting their distinct color schemes, target audiences, and language use. Pop magazines are bright and target young girls with more images than text, while rock magazines use darker colors and contain more text aimed at a broad audience, often featuring biased language. R'n'B and hip-hop magazines cater to teenagers and young adults with varying aesthetics and text-image ratios, demonstrating how magazine design evolves with the target age group.

1. Music Magazine Genres
By Eloise Barrett

2. I have been looking into some different music magazine genres to get
an idea on which genre I want to do and also to look for some ideas for
my own, e.g. colour schemes, types of pictures, etc. All of this will help
me when I come to design my own.

3. Pop
Pop magazines are generally bright and colourful, which attracts the readers as they will stand
out more then say a rock magazine. The audience that they aim for is usually young girls as the
colours are mainly pink and purple and the main star/stars on the front cover are usually in the
charts which is probably what the younger generation listen to so they will recognise who they
are. The language they use is very simple as I said before they are aiming for a younger
audience so they are making it simple enough for them to read. The text to image ratio is
around 1:3. There is clearly more images then text as it is, like I said before, for the younger
generation, this is because some of them may not be ‘big’ readers so there is still some text but
more pictures.

4. Rock
Rock magazines generally use dark, gloomy, dull colours as they relate to ‘heavy rock’. Target
audience for rock magazines varies as they are not made for one specific age group, but people
would say they were aimed for males, teenagers and middle aged. Specifically, the language
used in Kerrang is slang and there are quotes taken from band members and people who have
been to their gigs to try and increase the readers interest in the specific band. The language used
towards some of the bands are quite biased, and sometimes ‘bad’ reports are given to a certain
band to start a debate/discussion between fans but actually others might have really enjoyed the
bands gig. The text to image ratio, I would say is 2:1, there is definitely more text then pictures
but it’s not very noticeable as there are quite a few pictures.

5. R‘n’B
Most R‘n’B magazines are either bright or dark colours, just take a look at the ones bellow. The
one with Kanye West on is very bright with pink and blue text as the main colours, whereas the
one with Drake on is in black and white with just a yellow masthead. I would say the main target
audience for these types of magazines would be teenagers, any gender, because of the the main
picture used on the front cover, as they are either the latest R‘n’B singers or they are well known
by people. I have looked into it and I am not too sure on what type of language they use and
what the text to image ratio is.

6. Hip-Hop
Hip-hop was originated by African-Americans residing in the South Bronx in New York City in
the early 1970’s. Hip-hop magazines usually stick to the colours red, which indicates power and
authority, yellow, black and white. I would say their target audience is around 16-20, just
because of the people in the hip-hop industry, e.g. Beyoncé, Jay Z, Eminem. Everyone knows
Queen B but you wouldn’t really see an 8 year old listening to her or a 50 year old listening to
her, same with Jay Z and Eminem. I haven’t ever read a hip-hop magazine but because of the
target audience they are going for, I would say the language would be informal, maybe, formal
and the text to image ratio would be about 1:1 because even they are older teens and early
adults they may still like to look at the pictures and read the small captions underneath.

7. Summary
Overall, with every sort of magazine they all have their own unique
colour scheme, target audience and information. Like you can tell
throughout the 4 slides, you can see how the language changes within
the different genres, just like the text to image ratio. The younger the
target audience the more pictures it will have and the less writing it will
have and just the other way round for older target audiences.