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Full review of Q magazine

Full review of Q magazine

Q is a monthly magazine that focuses on content on rock and roll. The magazine was launched in 1986 and is an international magazine. It contains content like, world exclusives, definitive album reviews, outstanding production values and an inimitable sense of humour, Q shapes music in the UK and beyond.

Q has featured the world’s biggest artists with content from U2 to Adele, Oasis to Rihanna and loads more have featured on its land-mark cover. With Q’s online presence, a new interactive iPad edition, social media, Q Radio, live events and of course the world famous annual Q Awards – the most exclusive event in the music calendar – the message is everywhere. Music sounds better with Q.

Q is the UK’s number one actively-purchased music magazine. It’s about quality and character. Q’s readers prize its lavish photography, in-depth reporting and sense of humour. It is also about authority and opinion. It stands for the music that matters, the stars who make it and the people who love it. Q is trusted and influential. A positive review in Q can make a band’s career – and Q’s major interviews reverberate around the world. It gets unparalleled access to the biggest stars in rock and roll. And the audience is younger and more affluent than any other music monthly. 97% of readers rate Q as a quality magazine. In research it outperforms competitors on measures such as best interviews, writing and awards winning photography.

The majority of Q’s audience is male at 68.3% which is quite a lot more than female readers. The majority of their audience (70%) has an ABC1 profile. The age range ranges from 35.5% being 15-24 to 1.4% being 65+ meaning the magazine has a younger based audience.

Q magazine has its own award show called ‘The Q Awards’. The Q Awards are the UK's annual music awards run by the music magazine Q. Since they began in 1990, the Q Awards have become one of Britain's biggest and best publicised music awards. This appeals to the target audience as a lot of young people like to watch award shows and support their favourite artists, it also gives the opportunity to get a bigger fan base for the magazine as other will hear about the awards , enticing them to buy the magazine.

Q magazine has a rather popular website, which is WWW.QTHEMUSIC.COM. It has 329,000 unique users, 12,886 email subscribers, 569,659 page impressions. The online access is ideal for many users as its less popular for people to buy a physical copy a magazine now a days, most people would rather just read the online copy, rather than going out of their way to go to a shop and buy it.

Q magazine has a Facebook page with 32,556 Facebook fans and a twitter page with 69,549 followers. As Q magazine has a younger target audience it is ideal, as teens and young adults now a days are more likely to be on social networking sites, and if the magazine is on these sites then people who read the magazine can stay updated and other people may stumble across it on their newsfeed enticing them to buy or subscribe to the magazine.

Magazine Industry

Magazine industry- BAUER

Bauer is a publisher company with magazines including magazines like Closer, Heat, MOJO, Kerrang, Q and Empire. It creates and curates entertaining media content that audiences love whenever, wherever and however they want through a multi-channel strategy and a focus on product excellence and audience insight.

Bauer has a magazine subscription that includes online print and hard copies of the magazine. It has a large range of magazine subscription offers and states that it can guarantee the very best prices. This is sufficient for the consumer as they now have the variety of whether they want the hard copy or an online copy and it entices the audience as they promote the fact that they have the very best prices.

Bauer Media is in a unique position to be able to deliver ground-breaking consumer insight to media professionals, having more market leading brands across a wider breadth of markets than any other media owner.

Bauer Media's portfolio of influential media brands includes many of the best known magazines in the UK, which deliver excellent content to our audiences whenever, however and wherever they want. This provides an excellent platform for any business to reach their target audience through an effective magazine advertising campaign. In fact, in any given publication period 9.9m people in the UK will read a Bauer Media Magazine.

Bauer Media connects and engages 19 million consumers every week with the most influential brands in the UK. The value of our in-depth understanding of these audiences is reflected in our unrivalled research initiatives.

I think my magazine is most likely to be published by the magazine publishers Bauer as there is not really anything appealing for a younger audience with their publishers and the target audience for my magazine is around 15-25 year old girls. Bauer publishes magazines with content on gossip and celebrity life and my magazine will features segments of this, but in the music section of Bauer’s magazine range there is nothing for people who enjoy pop and chart, music and that is a massive industry that has millions of potential consumers, meaning there is a place for my magazine in the market in Bauer magazine publishers. 

The possible problems that can be faced with publishing with a big magazine publisher like Bauer is that a new magazine could potentially get over shadowed by the already popular magazines published by the company, however there is a clear gap in the market for a more pop vibe magazine, with elements of fashion, film and technology, which is already proving popular in the publishing company, with magazines such as Closer and Heat being published. Another factor that could be affected by being published with a larger magazine company is the editorial independence, as it’s such a big publishing company with high expectations they may take over the role of editor and change things to suit what they feel the audience wants in order to make profit, and this could lead to my initial target audience being adjusted.

A great advantage of publishing with a large magazine publishing company is that , a new magazine can be fundamentally supported by the company and can escalate quickly to become a more popular magazine and can even progress to becoming a more advanced media segment, by potentially having its own website, TV show etc.