Initial Findings

Research Conclusions

After looking at all the research I have gathered from studying the music press I now understand that the music press is an industry that has fallen under a lot of pressure over the past few years due to changes in the way mass consume their own music genres and media brands. There is an underground music scene that is slowly but steadily creeping into mainstream music culture and fans are finding new ways to bypass the mainstream and inject their own individual styles into the music press with fansites, fanzines and personalised Myspace pages. Audiences have begun to bramch out from more mainstream music ideals as they fear that music is fastlly becoming more about celebrity than talent and audiences dont appreciate the way most music magazines dictate the tastes in music to its readers. By creating brands and identities within music magazines most find this a way of stereotyping certain music tastes with specific cultural representations and this is becoming less widely accpeted by mass as auidences are now more open to accepting other genres of music.
This is key to creating a new brand that will be accpeted by audiences as when audiences feel that their needs and demands have been understood they will be willing to listen.
You need to give audiences a change to become the critic and to ask the questions, let them make up their own minds and show that there is an awareness of an underground music scene that has not been acknowledge in the past.

Product Conclusions

Taking the results of my questinnaire into consideration and the opinions of my focus group I have drawn together some initial conclusions that will help me in determining some flat plans and will allow me to gains some sort of focus.

I aim to produce a brand that enstils some back to basics music back into the music industry with focus on raw talent and the inspirations behind originality. My brand will be dedicated to acoustic music that has been homegrown from the underground music scene and will allow audiences access to their music. After doing some research into the music magazine industry I found that their were no magazines dedicated to acoustic music with the only option out there relating to professional music publications about how to create music based around acoustic styles. This tells me that here is a gap in the market for the type of brand I am offereing and I would face to no real competition in terms of content.

I hope to produce a product that incorporates audience participation in relation to interviews and reviews. I aim to do this by making my double page spread interview entirely dictated by questions sent in from readers. This will hopefully create a greater relationship between my audience and my brand.

As well as this i want to also include diversity in content by introducing politics, entertainment and sport into my magazine. This will widen my target audience demographic as well as targeting a wider range of readers.