Research and Planning - Music Magazine focus NME

Aim for todays lesson - Analyse a music magazine in the genre you are interested in

For my initial ideas, i am interested in the indie genre and taking inspiration from magazines such as NME. In this post i will look at reoccuring conventions of NME to help with my production of my magazine.

A reoccuring theme for NME front covers is that the main cover photo is either a medium close up/close up of a famous/front man of a band. Here in the selection i have picked it features; John Lennon of The Beatles, Dave Grohl of Nirvana, Morrissey of The Smiths, Noel Gallagher of Oasis, Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys and Paul Weller of The Jam. The main focus is on band members and bands of that genre. Here in my selection of covers, the Dave Grohl issue is an NME Icons edition showing how established the magazine is as it doesnt feature a masthead on. The John lennon cover is also a special edition and says '60 years of NME' so shows how big the magazine is.

 

In all the main photos the artists have been represented with attitude. Paul Weller is seen with his arms crossed and a stern expression, the anchorage text relates by saying 'stand up and fight' this gives the impression he is big (in the music industry). For Alex Turner he is holding a vinyl record with the acompanying text of 'the record that changed my life'. So NME has a reoccuring feature of having a pun/link to the image and achorage text. We know that NME represents people with attitude as in any NME cover you never see anyone smiling, they are always posing or larking around. Another thing with the posed NME photos is that they are structured wheareas gossip magazine such as heat often have unposed photos e.g. snaps from the paparazzi. This gets out the message that you get to really know about the band/artist in the magazine as it is an interview/exlusive to magazine if they have posed for them.

Another thing i have noticed with Nme covers is that they don't keep a consistent font on the covers. Every front cover features at least 2/3 different style fonts to adveritse whats inside, although the masthead keeps constant. With the masthead sometimes the main image overlaps, this just shows that NME is so established that they can miss out/hide letters of their masthead and people still recognise it as an NME magazine. However when an image does overlap as the masthead is only 3 letters long they always have at least 2 letters showing. By overlapping an image over the masthead it could represent just how big that artist