Genres in music magazines.

Understanding genre in music magazines

There can be many genres that music magazines have the option to cover and include. Some of these are: indie, heavy metal, goth, rock, pop and punk. These genres usually bass their content on what is often stereotyped with the genre by the public. For example, people often think that puck music is always associated with dark colours and that all people that listen to that sort of music dress a certain way. Genre is often known to easily affect the way that a magazine is laid out, the text it uses and also the array of colours used.

Another common stereotype is Emo. They are usually seen to be rebellious and often have a unique image. They often wear dark clothing and have dark or extravagant hair colours such as black or bright pink. Audiences very often perceive Emos to be depressed or extremely emotional (hence Emo). Emos often use make-up to accentuate their unique traits related to their personality or general appearance. A commonly know Emo band is My Chemical Romance. In the picture to the left, we can see that a few of the band members are wearing make-up. They have mainly focused on using dark colours around their eyes to make them more of a focus in the picture. Band members such as Gerard Way may have done this to show the pain in their eyes without having to write it down anywhere, by doing this a more physical bond is created between them and the reader.

Another genre of music, completely at the other end of the continuum would be pop music, otherwise known as popular music. Pop music almost always focuses on bands and artists in the charts such as One Direction, Olly Murs, Nicki Minaj and Emeli Sande. It is common for the front cover of magazines such as Top of The Pops (who talk about pop music) to include a modelled photo that is happy and bubbly. For example as seen on the left, One Direction are all smiling, emanating a positive attitude for the possible customers and readers! We can also see from this magazine front cover that the colours are all corresponding and are quite mellow. The colour pink is focused on a lot which gives the atmosphere a lift and makes it happier. As this is the music that clearly a lot of people like to listen to, and read about, some others may see that the content is too generic and they look to read and listen to things that are much more different. In other words those people are indie.

These indie people are also very often stereotyped by the public. People who follow indie trends usually like to be quirky and wear different clothes etc. Indie people tend to take interest in bands that are quite unheard of as they are seen to be ‘fresh’. It is quite rare that you find an indie based magazine because of the constantly changing interests of so many different personalities that all under the umbrella that is ‘indie’.