My Magazine Title

When deciding on my magazine title I looked at a few existing music magazines and found that alot of their titles weren't directly related to music. I would prefer my title to have some association to music because if I were to launch my magazine I would like people to know what it was about just by looking at the cover and seeing what it's called.

Two well known music related titles I found were NME-New Musical Express and KERRANG!

I decided that I didn't want my magazine title to be an acronym like NME but I like the fact that KERRANG! is onomatopoeic. I decided that i wanted my title to be something related to sound, and finally settled on the title NOISE.

I searched through a range of different fonts in photoshop for my magazine title. I was looking for something modern and different but bold, something that would be hard to miss if it was on a magazine stand.

Here are five of the fonts that I liked. I decided to use the first one because it is big and bold and eye catching without being too loud and detracting attention away from the rest of the cover.

'Behind NME Lines'

After reading Eva Wiseman's article about NME Magazine and how it has changed over the years we get the feeling that the magazine has moved into a whole new generation of publishing, leaving behind many of the aspects of it that people who had been buying since it was first created in 1952 had been reading it for. Once named a 'national institution' this article discusses whether the magazine can survive in the competitive world of music magazine publishing.

Wiseman talks about how over the years music publications seem to have become less and less important, now post 'tabloid invasion and Internet saturation', there doesn't seem to be so much of a gap in the market for magazines to be as successful as they once were when they were 'the only place i read about new music'.

As i have previously discussed, this article also highlights the falling sales in printed magazines, and NME's lowest recorded sale; 'The NME recently recorded its lowest ever sale - its readership falling 17.4 per cent year on year to little over 56,000'. This could be due to a number of things such as the global economic state or readers' falling interest in the magazine.

The magazine has received alot of criticism due to it's shameless approach; 'Morrissey claimed that the NME was trying to 'misstate, misreport, misquote, misinterpret, falsify, and incite the bloodthirsty' after remarks attributed to him on immigration were splashed across it's cover.'
It is incidents like this that may have caused readers to leave NME, seeing such an influential figure as Morrissey publicly battle the magazine could lead to a boycott. In addition alot of people do not agree with the new image that the magazine has taken on with featured bands commenting that 'The constant emphasis on trends and fashion is a little galling. It feels as though it's soul has been sold off piece by piece'. 'Ex readers sound wounded' at the extreme changes that the magazine has gone through and Neil Spencer 'says it's impossible to compare the paper he ran to the magazine today'.

The article suggests that readers and former contributors feel that the magazine has declined with age, whereas current writers and editors believe that it is progressing all the time, though falling sale suggest otherwise. With NME branching out into various other media sources the magazine has become less important and therefore lost the authenticity that it was once loved for.

Plummeting Music Magazine Sales

Recently sales in printed magazines have been falling, one of the main reasons for this is that the music industry is branching out into a wider range of media in order to publicise itself more efficiently. This means that it's not just magazines that can provide the public with news and information about music and artists but also music television and radio stations, online magazines, artist's official websites, review and download sights and even social networking sights.

Because of the recent credit crunch, magazines have become one of the non-essential day to day products that have suffered in sales as consumers do not have enough disposable income to use on magazines and have a choice of many other sources to get free information rather than having to spend money that is needed for my 'important' things.

With the rise of the Internet in the media world it has become such a crucial area of advertisement for many companies which has led to them spending more money on online ad campaigns therefore there is falling advertisement revenue for magazines which means a reduction in profits for many.