History Of Music Magazines

Investigate a music magazine currently on sale in Britain

NME is a famous music magazine created by Theodore Symthson. It stands for The New Musical Express and it has been published weekly since March 1952. NME started as a music newspaper until the 80's when they moved towards a magazine format. It was the first British paper to include a singles chart and NME covers things like Festivals, exciting brand new music, tips and advice to new bands from industry experts. In the 1970s it became the best-selling British music newspaper. An online version of NME was launched in 996, and is now the world'd biggest standalone music site with over 7 million users per month. 

The most recent editor is Mike Williams with Luke Lewis editing NME.com. 

NME was particularly associated with gonzo journalism (a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity normally a first- person narrative). Then it became closely associated with punk rock. They

have a double spread on the person on the front cover. Online you can view 13 pages of the current magazine that is on sale www.nme.com/magazine

NME like any other music magazine has a specific audience which they try to persuade to buy their magazine. From the website www.nrs.co.uk we can find out who buys the magazine, where they are from and their age. NME has more male readers than female and they are normally between the age 15-34. People who have an average - to a less than average pay are in the category C2DE, most people buy NME who are in the C2DE category. 

		Adults										Men		Women
		Total		ABC1		C2DE		15-34		35+		Total		Total
UNWEIGHTED SAMPLE		36242		21779		14463		8803		27439		16152		20090
EST.POPULATION 15+ (000s)		51037		27495		23542		16393		34644		24934		26103
		(000s)	%	(000s)	%	(000s)	%	(000s)	%	(000s)	%	(000s)	%	(000s)
NME/New Musical Exp	T	261	0.5	129	0.5	132	0.6	170	1.0	91	0.3	173	0.7	88	0.3

The housestyle of a magazine is how the design elements are consistant throughout the magazine. In NME the logo is always in uppercase letters, bright red and located in the top left hand corner this has made the logo very recognisable. On most of their front covers the sell lines are located around the edge of the image and they use very chatty language to engage the reader. The page numbers are always in bold and they have the date of the magazine issue next to it, therefore we can see that NME has a consistant housestyle.
NME is produced and distributed by ICP media this is the UK's leading consumer magazine publisher they also publish now, woman and Tvtimes to name a few. 

NME's target audience
Gender - Mostly male by the red, black and white writing on the front page and the language that is used inside the magazine. Also most of the music stars have more of a male fan base than female.
Age - Between late teens to late 30s
class - Lower class 
Ethnicity - Mainly british as it is a british magazine with british bands and artists