Codes and conventions of music magazines

Codes and conventions of music magazines

To create a music magazine, diversity is essential. If you were to just have one simple photo on a page with a minimal amount of text as a caption, readers would get very bored with what they have been presented with. You need to make a magazine front cover as interesting and enticing as you can by including things such as a mast head, cover lines, a main image and other important information such as a barcode or tag line. The two main focuses of the front cover are the mast head (found at the top of the page) and the main image. As these two elements are what catch the audience’s attention first they need to be interesting and appeal to a certain audience.

The cover lines will all be relative to the genre of the music magazine and some of them will often relate to the main image. For example in the image on the left you can see that one cover line reads ‘Mission accomplished! Noel, he did it his way.’ This certain cover line relates to the main image of Noel Gallagher.

Similar to the functions of the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover, a contents line will abide by basic standards including things such as page numbers, set colour schemes and parts of inside information, all aiming to entice the reader.

Every magazine will use codes and conventions and sometimes they can be so subtle that the reader doesn’t actually notice when they are being used as they may have become used to seeing them in other magazines. Most magazines notice that the codes and conventions they sometimes use are common and sometimes boring that’s why they may insert a USP for example in the image on the left, Top of the pops have included that they are offering 7 posters which sticks out as something different and extra they have to offer their potential audience.