Finished Product

Original Photos

Most of these images were cropped and altered in Photoshop.

Questionnaire Results

Original Ideas Statement

My idea for a music magazine is to have the genre an obscure topic. Lots of people listen to soundtracks whilst playing their games, but there has been no dedicated magazine for gaming soundtracks, so I am aiming to tackle obscurity and make music soundtracks a bit more recognized.


I plan to make the art style an 8 bit style, to appeal to the gaming industry. Generally, some of the best gaming music came from the era of 8-bit games, as the soundtracks were 8-bit too. The soundtrack is memorable to most long term gamers. 

Construction Schedule

The last two weeks of December, we started to construct our music magazines cover page. We started to decide on layout, fonts, colours etc until the Christmas holidays. On the first two weeks of January, we began to design and construct the contents page, deciding on fonts, images, colours etc. The last two weeks of January, we started to type up our feature articles. Placing images and writing articles, planning the layout. The first week or two of February, we went back over the magazine to see if anything needed changing/updating. After finishing, we started our evaluation and finishing all our coursework up to this point.

Evaluation Questions [Full]

Evaluation Question 7

Evaluation Question 6

Evaluation Question 5

Evaluation Question 4

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 1

Overview of Magazine Industry

There are more than 8000 magazine titles published in the UK, which have been split into 7 different categories, these include consumer, which was sold in newsagents for the general public. Another category is business (Trading, professional or B2B) for people at work, and another includes academic journals, for university-level discussion, aimed at the students in the universities. Others in the category include:

-Customer magazines

-Newspaper supplements

-Staff magazines

-and part works.

Some of these magazines are used for entertainment or to inform people of news/stories. Typically the gossip magazines, like OK! or Heat. Also in the Radio Times. Some of these magazines sometimes aims at consumer specialist titles aimed at hobbies or interests.

Statistically, the biggest consumer is Bauer Publishing with a 25% sale revenue, and IPC Media with 20%. The BBC and National Magazine Company had just under 8% sale revenue. (Statistics from 2008)

In 1980, there were around 1400 titles, but today that has more than doubled, now with 3200 titles in the UK today, and 1.4 billion magazines are sold in a year, but not coming close to the 2.1 billion magazines sold in 1970. Advertisers spent £745 million in magazines in 2008 and consumers spent £2 billion on magazines annually. Statistics show that only 30% of the titles are popular for more than 4 years.

The most favored Women's magazines are:

-Glamour

-Cosmopolitan

-Yours

-Woman and Home

-Good Housekeeping

The more popular under 18s catagorys are:

-Moshi Monsters Magazine

-Fun to Learn (Friends edition)

-Fun to Learn (Peppa Pig edition)

-Cbeebies Art

-Top of the Pops

Top 4 Men's lifestyle magazines are:

-Men's Health

-Nuts

-FHM

-GQ

Colour Mood Board

Colour Mood Board, a photo by Rozzachu on Flickr.

These will be the main colours I will use in my magazine. All of them have black and white, but mostly blue will be used if possible.

Text and font Mood Board

Text and font Mood Board, a photo by Rozzachu on Flickr.

I used these fonts because these fit my main purpose of Gaming and the soundtracks to go along with it. I am more than likely to use the first 4 but I will experiment and see which works the best.

Advertisers Mood Board

Boop2, a photo by Rozzachu on Flickr.

My Mood Board- 1

Boop, a photo by Rozzachu on Flickr.

Magazine Publishers

Future PLC

'PLC' is a magazine publisher that primarily aims their audience at gaming guru's and teenagers getting into gaming. Many of their titles have the same or slight differences when it comes to the age group and gender they aim for, which is about 13+ because of some of the games that are advertised. Usually when people say 'gaming', members of the public would straightaway assume it was a masculine activity. 'PLC' follows this 'stereotype' so they can sell more of their products. All to most of their products are technology based, so the large amount of demographic, but 'PLC' also publishes women's magazines but by looking at the category it comes under, their magazines for women are more creative than they are models etc. This can imply that the magazine is aimed at older women with more time on their hands, and even housewives.

Bauer

'Bauer' is the most popular UK music magazine/media publishers. 'Bauer' owns about all of the music magazines, covering a wide range of audience, since all their products age vary from young (15) to old (70) with stuff like 'Kerrang!' and 'BBC Music'. 'Bauer' even owns some of the most popular Radio Stations, 'Q Radio' being one of them. Bauer is good for publishing music magazines but it'd be hard to be a part of 'Bauer' as one of their magazines because there are so many magazines that cover a large amount of audience, but if you were to get 'Bauer' as a publisher then sales can be quite high quickly because other 'Bauer' products can advertise yours.

IPC Media

'IPC' are primarily aimed at women as most of their products are about TV shows for women, reality stories for women about women and gossip about the celebrity world. The age group for their magazines is around 25-35. Usually at this time women are in a relationship or married, and usually want to make an impression on their husband. There are some magazines aimed at older and higher class men doing high class activities/sports like shooting. 

Magazine Publishers analysis- FuturePLC

For my magazine, I have chosen 'Future PLC'. Future PLC has released many top selling products including The 'Official Nintendo Magazine', 'Official PlayStation Magazine' and more. This suggests that 'PLC' is primarily aimed at one target audience, children to young adults (8-18), and technology like gaming and PCs have been in their lives their entire lives, new generation children are familiar with tech so this is a good audience for them to aim their products at.

I have decided to choose 'PLC' because my magazine is aimed at teenagers that are in highschool and further education (14-18). 'PLC' is perfect for my 'genre' of music, because my magazine is all about soundtracks in games which slips in nicely with the other magazines.

Future PLC is known primarily for gaming magazines, and the list is quite large:

Magazines/Digital Editions:

• Official Xbox Magazine (US)
• Xbox 360: The Official Magazine (UK)
• PlayStation: The Official Magazine
• Nintendo: The Official Magazine
• PC Gamer
• Edge
• GamesMaster
• Official Pokemon Magazine

Online/Mobile:

• GamesRadar.com
• Computerandvideogames.com
• Officialnintendomagazine.co.uk
• Officialplaystationmagazine.co.uk
• Oxm.co.uk
• Oxmonline.com
• Pcgamer.com
• Edge-online.com

Events:

• Golden Joystick Awards

Source: http://www.futureplc.com/what-we-do/portfolios/games/

I did not choose 'Bauer' because their mostly known for a lot of music style magazines but usually their magazines are aimed at an older audience, taking 'Q' as an example. I thought 'PLC' because of the style of music I am aiming it at a slightly obscure type of music.

Why I chose to do Music Soundtracks was because when people buy games they tend to rate them on a graphical and story level, but never really to target the music, so the aim of the magazine is to open the eyes of a regular teenage critique and help them to realise to stop and listen to music.