Audience Profile

In order to create an audience profile, I created and shared a survey in order to find out what people wanted from the magazine. Below is a copy of the survey I created through SurveyMonkey.com

Survey Questions

1. Are you male or female?
Male
Female

2. What genres of music are you interested in?
Blues
Country
Electronic
Hip-Hop / Rap
Jazz
Pop
Rock
Alternative
Metal

3. What music magazines (if any) do you read?
NME
Kerrang
Classic Rock
Q
Rolling Stones

4. Would you be interested in buying a new magazine based on your favourite genre?
Yes
No

5. How much would you like to pay for such a magazine?
£1 - £1.99
£2 - £2.99
£3 - £3.99
£4 - £4.99
£5+

6. Which of these do you think is a suitable title for a magazine covering classic rock?
The Pick
Unplugged
Timeless
Generation

Survey Results

After getting a certain amount of responses via people on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and through people in my Media class, I analysed the results. Below are my findings.

The reason I asked this question was to see which gender responded in majority to a survey based on music magazine. While I can hardly use these results accurately to assume anything about my market, it does give me an insight into the people who generated the other results.

Rock is clearly a favourite music genre in my survey, which has given me a great insight onto what I could base my magazine on. Using my original idea to create a classic rock magazine, I think these findings back up the idea of sticking to that genre, as there are definitely people who are interested in rock as a genre. In hindsight I should have added classic rock to the genre list specifically given rock's wide span of variations.

In general, most of the people who responded read NME, if they read any music magazine. Non responded to reading Classic Rock or Rolling Stone, the two magazines which are probably going to be similar to mine. This could be good, in the sense that the audience I asked (mainly male teenagers) do not read competitors, but also bad as they may not read it due to a lack of interest in the genre. Using this information, I'm going to stick to my original idea of a more sophisticated classic rock magazine, but attempt to draw in a younger crowd as well, possibly by using similar conventions to magazines like NME.

This tells me that out of the people who don't read music magazines, most would if they could find the right one. After establishing there is an audience out there for the rock genre, this information is helpful as some people may not have been interested in magazines generally as a format. Now I know that it isn't much of an issue to draw people to buy a magazine generally, as long as it is suited to their tastes.

The £3-£3.99 price bracket is definitely the most popular. Interestingly enough, the £4-£4.99 bracket was extremely unpopular, but the £5+ bracket was the third highest. This shows me that people will be willing to pay more for a magazine if it does suit their tastes. However, I shall stick with the £3-£3.99 bracket, as it was the most popular, and seems like it would be good value for a magazine, especially a monthly one like I had planned mine to be.

This was a question used more for the sake of creating the magazine rather than creating an audience profile, but it did give me an insight into the audience slightly. Timeless and Generation seem to be names more specific to a classic rock magazine, while The Pick and Unplugged are a lot more vague. However rather than one style being clear leaders, as evident above, The Pick and Generation were main leaders. I feel not many people liked the Timeless name because it seems to have older connotations. Not only based on it's leading status among my audience, but because of it's vague name, I have decided to go with The Pick as it will aid me in creating a classic rock magazine while still trying to attract a younger market. It would be harder to attract both with more specific names like Generation or Timeless. 

Conclusion

Through this survey, I have managed to create an audience profile for my magazine. I'm going to aim more a more sophisticated, mature market but without isolating a younger audience. However, in trying to cater for a younger audience, I need to be careful not to do so by 'dumbing down' the content, but rather aim for a more mature younger audience, which I believe to be out there. I'm going to create the magazine based on the classic rock genre, but possibly cover some other similar sub genres of rock as well in order to show variety. For the price, I will probably set the magazine at about £3.99 for a monthly release. 

Mood Board

I also created a mood board of the typical artists that might attract the audience I wish for my magazine to cater for so I knew more about the content to put in to efficiently attract my target audience.