Magazine Market Research

My magazine is going to be a bit like NME and Q, NME is published by IPC media and Q is published by Bauer.

Music magazines that the IPC publish are: Mousebreaker, NME, Nuts and Uncut. The only music magazine published by this company that my magazine is based on is NME.

As you can see the vast majority of sales are one off sales bought from newsstands or shops. The single copy subscription rate is quite high at over 6000 subscriptions. Whereas the multiple copy subscription sales are 30 which is extremely low, I would include something such as rewards for getting multiple copy subscriptions to try and attract more people to get them.

Out of the magazine produced 99.8% of them were sold, this shows that everything included in the magazine seems to be successful and they are doing something right to sell such a vast quantity of the magazines. This shows that this company may be a good company to publish my magazine as they have been so successful with NME and my magazine will be quite similar to it.

As you can see the average age of the reader is 24 so I think that £2.40 is a reasonable price. It also says that 45% of the readers spend a lot of money on clothes. This means that I could possibly include a fashion section in my magazine to appeal to a large percentage of readers. It says that 52% are working part time and 7% are working part time, this shows that the class of the people that buy this sort of magazine are working class. Also 29% of the audience are still studying which shows that quite a lot of the audience could be quite

young. 94% of the audience use the internet, this shows it would probably be a good idea introducing an online version of the magazine and including links to things to look for on the internet. The majority of the audience is mainly male at 69% and then 31% female with an average age range of 24. The social grade is 65% ABC 1 which is all of the middle classes.

Music magazines that Bauer publish are: Q and Kerrang. They also own a lot of radio companies such as kiss and magic. This is a good thing as if they could be representative of the same genre so you could advertise the magazine on the radio stations. Kerrang is not really a magazine that is similar to the magazine that I will be producing but Q is.

As you can see the vast majority of sales are one off sales bought from newsstands or shops. The single copy subscription rate is quite high at over 23,000. Then with only 36 multiple copy subscriptions, this seems to be the same as for NME so it shows that something definitely needs to be done to try and increase this number with things such as promotions.

Out of the amount of magazines produced 98% of the magazines were sold, which is slightly less than what was sold of NME, this shows that NME may be a better magazine to base my magazine on. It also shows that the company Bauer media may not be as good as IPC to publish with. The price of the magazine is £3.99 and it comes out monthly I think this is a decent price for a magazine which comes out monthly.

From the reader profile of Q magazine you can see that the majority of the readers are male at 68.3% and the rest are female at 31.7%. As you can see the majority of the readers are in the ABC 1 category so the £3.99 price tag per month is quite affordable. The majority of the readers of Q are between the ages of 15-24 years old at 35.5%.

Kerrang is a little bit different from Q and NME as it is a bit harder rock than these 2 magazines. But some of the music merges so it is still worth looking at. Kerrang is published by Bauer media which is the same company that Q is published by.

As you can see the vast majority of sales are one off sales bought from newsstands or shops. The single copy subscription rate is over 7000. And the multiple copy subscription sales is 3. There is a definate trend that not many people want a multiple subscription copy. This problem would be adressed in my magazine so that there would be more multiple copy subscription sales.

Out of the magazines produced 99.4% were sold which is very good. This shows that this company may be good at getting the magazine out there and knowing how many to produce. This company sells a lot more music magazines than the IPC as you can see from theres certificates. This shows that Bauer media may be a better company to publish my magazine with. As you can see the price is £2.20 and it comes out every 2 weeks, so I think this is quite a reasonable price.

As you can see the gender ratio is very close to being 50/50% between male and female. And the majority of the readers are between the age range of 15-14 at the percentage of 56.1%. Only just over half of the readers are in the ABC 1 category so the rest may be of a lower class which means the £2.20 every 2 weeks may be a bit more of a heavy asking price.

The publisher I would chose to publish my magazine would be Bauer Media as it seems that they sell a lot more copies of their magazines. Whereas IPC media seem to sell a bit less. IPC media seem to sell more music magazines so I believe that there is a little bit of a gap in the market for my magazine with the Bauer Media company.