Magazines are directed at a certain demographic, which influences what content goes into them in order to cater to the interests of the reader.

Yougov.co.uk is a website which shows the demographics for different bands, sports teams and people etc so can help deduce what kinds of people as interested in the same things. Using this website and other sources we created an audience profile for a popular music magazine, mine being Billboard:

Billboard audience profiling

 

From this research, I deduced that the audience Billboard is directed at are young adults, mostly women, who are interested in a plethora of different music genres. These people are also into mostly mainstream music, which becomes apparent by the popular music artists featured on many of it’s front covers. Another way in which Billboard caters to it’s audience is in its’ colour scheme, the black and white photo creates an edgy feel, reflecting the young and contemporary reader demographic.

It is important to cater to your specific audience because, as shown by Blumler and Katz’s Uses and Gratification theory, the audience controls what media is produced by only consuming what they want to. This leads to the media institutions, including magazine companies, to be mindful of their audience when producing because if the audience chooses not to engage then the magazine will not be successful.