Evaluation Q3

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

The magazines published by Time Inc. UK cover a large variety of hobbies and pastimes, but they are mainly targeted at women rather than men, and many of their magazines focused at men are about sports – shooting, sailing etc. The magazines published by Bauer Publishing Group get much closer to my target market, with many automotive magazines and music magazines. These are aimed more at men than women, compared to Time Inc. UK. 

The music magazines published by Time Inc. UK focus on two very different areas. NME focuses solely on new music and acts, but Uncut, their other music publication, is more about older music. The genres most popular with Uncut Readers are Rock, Classic Indie, and Americana. These differ quite a lot with the genres popular with my target market. Although Rock may overlap, it is more likely to be older Rock with Uncut fans, and newer Rock with my fans. Additionally, Classic Indie and Americana are very different to metal, which is the main genre popular with my magazine’s fans.

 

The magazines published by Bauer Publishing Group line up slightly more with my target audience, but not exactly, due to the niche nature of my chosen genre. Mojo Magazine focuses on new music, but does not limit genre, so it features a lot more pop music than my target audience would want to read about. Q gets slightly closer to my target audience, as it focuses on modern music “distilling it down to the good stuff”, which would resonate with the part of my target audience looking for new bands curated by people with good taste. They also cover gigs, something my magazine also uses as a selling point, but like Mojo, the bands covered are of a slightly wider variety of genres than what my target audience listens to. Kerrang! gets closest to my target audience, covering new rock bands. However, many bands in Kerrang! suffer from being more about image than music, something I wanted to move away from with my magazine.
 

I believe that Time Inc. UK has a better market for my product, as my magazine focuses on a target audience very different to any that they try to sell to with their other magazines. This means that they would be targeting a whole new group, instead of trying to sell another magazine to the same group. The magazines published by Bauer Publishing Group are too similar to the other interests of my target audience, meaning that they would be trying to sell at least two magazines to a target audience, which could hurt the sales of both, as people may be unwilling to buy more than one magazine style publication a month.