The document reflects on the importance of the front cover, contents page, and double page spreads in grabbing readers' attention and appealing to the target audience. The author plans to take inspiration from successful music magazines for these elements and combine them in a way that appeals to a wide hip-hop/rap audience. Research also showed the magazine should be affordable and include standard features like interviews and freebies to attract different age groups interested in the genre.

1. Reflection
From my front cover research I have learnt that the target audience is the key element to
what is put on the cover. This is because it needs to appeal to the types of things they like
to see. Contents pages are also important in grabbing the readers attention as they need to
see the main articles so that they know if they will like it or not. If they don’t like the look of
a contents page, they will most likely not buy the magazine, it may not include the types of
things they are looking for. Double page spread, I think, isn’t as important as both the front
cover and contents page, however it is still important for it to appeal to the audience.
I plan to use this knowledge to make my magazine appeal to a wider audience, I know this
will be hard as it needs to have an element of each audience yet still stay in the range of
hip-hop/rap. I will take inspiration from magazines like Billboard, Vibe and XXL for my front
cover as I think these magazines are very successful in the things I want to achieve. For the
contents page I plan to take parts of pages that I have found and combine them into a new
type of contents page. As for my double page spread, I want to take inspiration from the
‘Nicki Minaj’ page as I really like the look of this and I think it goes very well with the genre
of my magazine.
My audience research has taught me that a magazine shouldn’t be too expensive and
should include the norms of a magazine, like exclusive interviews and freebies. It has also
taught me that I need to make it appeal to a wide range of age groups as many people are
interested in the music genre, not just one specific group. This will influence me because I
will want to add all of these things into my magazine so it does appeal to my audience in a
very personal way.