Planning - Target Audience

When beginning to plan my main task - the music magazine - the first thing I need to look at is what I would like my target audience to be, as this will be the basis of the product design.

I have decided to aim my music magazine at older teenage females and young women, from around the ages of 15 to 21, as there is not a dominant magazine in this area of the market. Though there are a substantial number of music magazines aimed at teenagers, such as Kerrang, Rocksound, NME and Q, I feel that the majority of these magazines are male dominated: when I browsed through several issues of NME and Kerrang in particular, only a handful of the images used were of females. I want to create a magazine which shows women in powerful positions in the music industry, but without disregarding males entirely; my magazine is intended to be slightly girly to appeal to a female audience.

I want to make my magazine inspiring, and want it to show female role models for older girls who are interested in music - but not specifically Pop music, which is the area in which most of our female artists stem from. A good example of a female role model (the kind I would like to encourage to be featured in my magazine) would be an artist like Hayley Williams; she is arguably the most dominant member of the band Paramore, and is largely successful and considered to be a role model to a large number of teenage girls.

Whilst I recognise that there are music magazines aimed at females, the majority of them give off an immature impression, which is something I would like to go against when creating my magazine. For example, Top of the Pops magazine gives off a cluttered, childish vibe because of all the bright pinks, purples and bubble-style fonts - though this is popular with readers of a younger age, I want my magazine to have a more mature, professional style and layout.

I have decided that the genre of my magazine will mainly be Indie music, as this particular type of music varies in style from band to band, and this would allow a lot more female artists to be involved in my magazine, without being Pop musicians: if I had decided to create a rock magazine for women, it would have been considerably harder as there are very few female rock musicians.

So, to sum up my target audience, they would ideally be:

• ambitious females
• in their late teens, early twenties (15-21)
• interested in Indie music