Institutions

Institutions

There are many different publishing houses and they focus on a wide range of music genres. Some will be specific to one genre and others will produce magazines from across a range of genres.

BBC magazines, the magazine publishing division of BBC Worldwide, are responsible for making TOP of the POPS. However, it also makes a wide range of other magazines (not all of them music magazines). They also publish the magazine ‘BBC Music’. These magazines have different target audiences and are quite clearly laid out in different ways and with different intentions. They have different colour schemes and use a wide range of different fonts. These help us to distinguish between the target audiences of these magazines. For example a magazine with a more bold/bright colour scheme, TOP of the POPs, is more likely to be aimed at a younger target audience. Its use of bright pink also highlights the fact that this magazine has a girly theme to it. Whereas a more mature target audience would be looking for a simpler colour scheme, however this does not mean that the magazine does not have to look appealing/ eye catching for the audience.

Different magazine publishing companies focus on different areas of the music market because they try to find popular genres and styles that appeal to different target audiences. For example they will focus on different stereotypes, age groups and genders. My magazine would be likely to be published by the same section of BBC magazines that publish TOP of the POPS because they have the same target audience.

IPC media is another publishing company. It produces NME; however this one is slightly different from others because although the magazine itself has a very Indie layout it features artists across all genres of music. This gives it a great opportunity to appeal to a wide range of audiences. However, this can mean that it will not always appeal to everyone meaning that it may fail to gain loyal customers that will subscribe or continue to buy the magazine on a regular basis.

IPC media own NME and although this is more popular than a magazine such as BBC music, the company is somewhat smaller than BBC magazines because of the amount of magazines it produces and many of these are very popular for example TOP of the POPS.

It is important that there are different production companies focusing on different target audiences and genres because it means that magazines are focusing entirely on specific genre at a time and means that the audience can get as much detail as they want from the magazine. The fact that there is more than one institution publishing each genre means that there is competition and the magazines have to improve their quality all the time to get ahead of the opposition.