This is my analyses of a music magazine front cover, I explored how media language can be used to attract a target audience in order to achieve a “preferred reading“.

Firstly, I went on Music Week’s website in order to find it’s mission statement which is a concise explanation of what the purpose and the organisations overall intension is, it aids understanding of what vision they are trying to create. Then, I looked into who their target audience could be as you must know your audience in order to cater to their likes and interests (“preferred reading“)  in order for them to buy the magazine and make money- the main purpose in the media industry. You can segment your audience in many different ways to really tailor the magazine to suit them, I segmented the audience by demographic and their psychographic traits. By looking at the demographic I decoded that this magazine is quite gender neutral but this particular cover targets more female audience and the age seemed to target young adults/university students ages 18-25. For psychographics, it was apparent that this was a magazine aimed for individualists who don’t follow the mainstream music which is evident with the other artists featured in the cover lines.

Next, I decoded the design of the magazine (media language), interpreting why the media producer used that typeface, those colours, that image and that choice of language to communicate meaning. Analysing the magazine made me realise that, the type of font to the colour pallet are all significant. For example, we can see they chose the greyish simple colours to represent a contemporary feel with the pop of colour to stand out the name of the star “Olivia” mirroring her signature colour throughout her album.

Thinking forward, this activity has taught me how to analyse front covers in great detail and I now can understand the thought process of why they chose that particular image or why the picked that colour pallet. As a result, these skill will aid me for when I make my magazine cover and I now have the knowledge of what makes a conventional magazine cover, how to use media language to attract the target audience and finally how to overall achieve this “preferred reading” to cater to the desired audience needs and wants in order for success.