Analysis of Q magazine

The magazine that I have decided to look into more depth about its history of the magazine is ‘Q magazine’, the magazine has been around since 1986 when they published their first issue. The founders of Q magazine were Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, the reasons why they decided to create Q magazine was due to the fact that they felt media were ignoring a generation of older music buyers. Q was firstly published by EMAP (a British media group) in October 1986, this magazine made sure that they set itself apart from other regular music magazine. By publishing monthly, making photography and printing standards considerably higher for the audience. In the early years of Q magazine, it was sub-titled as ‘The modern guide to music and more’. The magazine was originally meant to be called ‘Cue’ as it means cueing a record ready to play, which made more sense at the time due to what the magazine was mainly focused on being music. However, the name was changed so that the public wouldn’t mistake the magazine for being a snooker magazine. They then resolved into a single lettered magazine, due to it looking more prominent of newsstands.

In 2008, Q launch a radio station called ‘Q radio’ Coldplay were involved with the launching of this radio station. Which consisted of an exclusive interview of them, the station was based in Birmingham alongside the Kerrang, which is now closed. The magazine includes a review section, featuring a new releases page for music, reissues for music, music compilations, film and live concert reviews and lastly radio and television reviews. The magazine also includes star rating (from one to five) of an album and television advertising for the album in the UK. According to previous research, the majority of Q’s reader are male being 66.2%, however the statistics also show that the 83.8% of the readers are from the ages of 15-44 years. This means that the magazine reaches a wider target audience range, than they possible would have perhaps meant to aim for. The pricing of the magazine is £4.20, due to how frequent they release the magazine being a month. Due to how often it is released, makes it easier for the audience to purchase the magazine as £4.20 isn’t much per month.

The styling of the magazine is different from others, due to them only having a one lettered masthead for their magazine. The colours that they normally use in their magazine is red, white and also black. For the masthead, they have decided to use a bold font yet has an unserious feel to it. The masthead being ‘Q’, is normally positioned in the top left hand corner with a bold squared red background to make the font colour stand out substantially more. Normally, the magazine includes their main feature person on the front cover of their magazine. The picture usually takes us the whole of the front cover, however they change how they angle the image for instance the sizing of the image and also how closely they shoot the image whether that being a full body image or just a top section images. I would also say from observing the magazine, that they don’t have much of a variety of fonts due to them being extremely similar to one another on the front page.

‘Q’ magazine also has a Facebook page, for their fans to be able to keep up with their post and releases, they have 104,416 likes on their page. On twitter Q has 116K followers and on Instagram they have 5,117 followers. This means that the magazine also reaches many people on social media websites, such as the ones above.