Evaluation Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

Even though my magazine was originally intended to be more like NME, it ended up being more heavily influenced by Kerrang!

KERRANG! Audience Profile
 Young, individually minded and passionate consumers, an audience defined by attitude, passion and loyalty.
Radio - 15-35 male bias.

(http://www.bauermedia.co.uk/Brands/Kerrang/)

Kerrang! brings in a total audience of approximately 356,000 people weekly. Of that figure, 193,000 of them will be in the A, B, and C1 economic groups (around about 54%). This ranges from high and middle ranking professionals to White-Collar workers. This leaves the other 163,000 as blue collar workers, unkskilled manual workers and the unemployed. 313,00 of these consumers are aged 15-44, the remaining 12% are 45+. 67% of Kerrang's readers are male. Unfortunately the age bands i've found are wide, but this tells me that the target audience is young men in the C1 economic group. http://www.nrs.co.uk/toplinereadership.html (click link 'general magazines',
then 'October '10 - September '11')

However, this group doesn't (in my opinion) fit the appearance of the magazine, and our target audience research found that Kerrang! readers were predominantly teenage girls - which seems more appropriate to me, as the magazine is mainly filled with quite small articles surrounded by large images of rugged young men in bands, and on a look at the fan mail page I didn't see a single post from a 35-year-old man in a suit! I presume these statistics are about the buyers of the magazine, not the readers...


NME Audience Profile

65% Male
50% 16-24
79% ABC1*

(http://www.nme.com/mediapack/)

NME is bought weekly by around 253,000 people. Just under two fifths of these people are blue-collar workers, unskilled manual labourers and the unemployed, already this tells us that the readers of NME are richer/have better jobs than readers of Kerrang! Magazine. In terms of age, 13% of NME magazine readers are over 45 years of age, a similar figure to Kerrang!. 167,000 of the 253,000 readers are male - 66%.

This seems more realistic to me, as NME tends to use slightly less vivid colours, more live (less photoshopped) images, so the subjects look more honest and less perfect. These subjects are also in more of a mix of genders. Kerrang! only seemed to feature one or two women in their magazine, and i'd hazard a guess of about a third of NME's articles being about female artists.

http://www.nrs.co.uk/toplinereadership.html (click link 'general magazines', then 'October '10 - September '11')


From this, I decided that my target audience should be in the C2 and D economic class, as they are more likely to be nearer the age group I'm aiming for, which would be young adults, so between the age of 17 and 25. This would mean that they're more likely to want something substantial and informative to read, it would also mean they have the money to go out to different gigs, and will be wanting to find the best ones to spend their time and money on! Most of the bands covered will be Rock/Metal, which are two male-dominated genres, so my target audience will be women.



Our audience research: