Magazine Cover Analysis One

The BBC Music magazine is seems to be aimed at the older generation of people. The media pack does not disclose the average age of the people they are aiming at but it does state that 65% of readers are men. This surprises me as the fonts on this cover and the content of this issue of the magazine says to me that the majority of readers would be female. Class wise, I would say it aims more at middle upwards as not many working class families will have their children in a choir (see main photograph). This is backed by the fact that 66% of all their readers are ABC1 class.

The Price of the magazine reflects the working class target audience. £4.80 is pretty high price for a magazine but as they are aiming at a working class, most of their target audience will have a fiver to spare.

The header of the BBC Music magazine is always in the same place, large print at the top of the cover. This is the same for the BBC logo.This is so their readers will start to recognise the magazine by only glancing at it as they don’t need to look around the cover to find the name of the magazine. The swirly font represents the music that the magazine is about as music flows freely as does the text. You can see that the header is in normal type apart from two letters in music: “US” is written in italics to make it stand out. This maybe attracts new readers as it implies the magazine is part of a wider community of people who enjoy the music the BBC covers. It invites new readers in who want to be part of something bigger than just a reader of a magazine.

The colours used in the magazine can reflect what the magazine is about. The red on the chorister’s robe for example contrasted by the green on the tree behind him quickly remind us about Christmas, as does the photograph of the holly in the bottom left corner. The font of the main cover line also represents the winter months and Christmas time as each letter seems to have a star like ending to it which reminds readers of the Christmas star. This reinforces the fact that this is a Christmas issue and will therefore be mainly focused on this. The colours of the fonts are pretty standard for a magazine, there are three colours on this cover and the standard is around two to four. If it gets any higher than this, it becomes busy and confusing to the eye. If only one colour is used, it can look quite boring.