Kerrang magazine evaluation

KERRANG! magazine evaluation.
Casestudy
The magazine KERRANG! was first published on the 6^th of June 1981. The magazine making company Bauer Consumer Media published KERRANG! in the United Kingdom, so it particularly aimed at British teenage boys and girls aged between 15-18. Bauer Consumer Media is a large German publishing company, so the magazine could also apply to German teenagers around the same age and or older.
The magazine’s name “KERRANG!” is onomatopoeic. Onomatopoeic means that it’s a word that imitates or suggests the source of the sound that it describes, therefore KERRANG! refers to the sound made by playing a power cord on an electric guitar. The magazine may attract readers to its title as they may recognize the word in that way, also by its colour, the way the letters look like they have been smashed and therefore its originality, which should please the target audience.

KERRANG! was first edited by Geoff Barton, a British journalist who found Kerrang! heavy metal magazine and was an editor of Sounds music magazine/newspaper devoted to the current New Wave of British Heavy Metal (or 'NWOBHM' for short nowadays as its more ‘in’)
AC/DC was the first band to appear on the front cover of KERRANG! I believe this promoted the band to become even more popular worldwide, i.e. becoming popular with Britain as they are an American rock band. This also appeals to the TA of the first magazine as they might want to know who this band is and so they have found a magazine that tells them about new bands and current bands, which slowly become popular and mainstream. Instantly making the TA buying the magazine as everyone else would be, they would also gain a new sense of style from KERRANG! from the different bands, as the bands in the magazine are most likely the readers idol and so they would want to be like them, therefore dress like them. This is why KERRANG! promotes and advertises clothing ranges such as Hot Topic, SoHo and other styled clothing companies which band members would buy their clothes from.

KERRANG!’s genre of music is obviously rock, Goth, Indie and Emo, It is obvious because of a lot of features that I noticed from the magazine, such as the choice of band members, advertisements of certain types of festivals and concerts that the target audience would appreciate and use. I believe that the target audience are catered for their style and interests, such as the music they like, KERRANG! provides this. As a fact, I know that a person, who for example likes certain music such as RNB, would not read KERRANG! as it is not their type of music, it does not appeal to them and so they would not buy and read it (Also from just looking at the front cover, they would know its not their type of music magazine that they would want.) And so, people such as older teenagers around the age of 16-20, who like mainly music genres such as rock and metal to be precise, would notice KERRANG! and buy it straight away, especially from its noticeable logo design and vibrant text, that stands out from the background. The text is usually white or yellow with a black background; this automatically makes an effective sell line that will catch the reader’s eye.

The text in the magazine is also in bold. I can tell that the magazine is for young adults (16-20 years estimate) from the style of the font too. It is a simple ------. I know that this font is informal yet formal, meaning it isn’t for an upper class reader- rather a young teen who would not (in my opinion) really care about how the font is, so the magazine editors obviously think this through and use it successfully. Linking to the style of font that they have used, the ‘gutter’ is rather wide. A ‘gutter’ is the distance between two columns of text, if the gutter is small then the reader will believe that there is a lot of text in the magazine, because they would rather read than look at loads of images. In KERRANG! magazine, the reader would want to see more image than text, therefore the ‘gutter’ makes this look like there is less text, so then there is (what it looks like) large pictures on the page of the magazine. This is also because the majority of readers who buy this magazine are male, namely because of the male attire that it shows on the front cover, most women would be put off by (for example) a shirtless man with long, sweaty hair, smashing a guitar. But men in other words would buy this magazine, the front cover’s model would appeal to them, they would want to be like the rock star on the front cover as he appears to be masculine, rich, famous and probably ‘have all the women’. To back this up I looked in a KERRANG! magazine and found a couple of phrases that would back up my theory of believing (mainly) men would read this magazine.