Genre Choice and Audience Research

I have decided to base this project around Classical Music Magazines. So for this I have been doing some research on such magazines as 'Gramophone' and 'BBC Music Magazine'.

For Gramophone magazine I had some statistics emailed to me. It turns out that 36,817 copies are sold every month. of this, 94% of consumers are male that are 88% ABC1 with an average age of 54 and have an average annual income 0f £48,053. this just goes to show that this is quite a classy magazine possibly for the 'successfull career' market. however in today's technologies with access to the Internet from just about everywhere, these figures may not be as accurate as they once used to be. On the online version of gramophone published once every month there are 87,315 registered users to the site(nearly 3 times the number for sold copies in circulation) with a huge 900,000 page impressions per month.

Overall though for the published copies of Gramophone in print and the online version the social demography is as follows:

• A/B = 48%
• C2 = 4%
• C = 40%
• D/E = 2%

I find that the target Audience for 'Gramophone Magazine might be hard to grasp with the Age group and the Gender group being my biggest concerns.

On the other hand I did get some information about another classical music magazine called 'BBC Music Magazine' on nrs.co.uk. I am found this information more useful because in total this information was based on 144,000 readers all reading the BBC magazine. this information showed that 89,000 readers are aged 15-44 where as only 53,000 are aged 45+. This fits in with the age group I would most like to target. There was also a much more balanced figure between Genders with 88,000 out of 142,000 readers being male and 54,000 out of 142 readers being female. I prefer this result over the 'Gramophone Magazine' result because it shows that more people in general are interested in the magazine and it can appeal to a much wider variety of people.

Social Demographic results showed that:

• ABC1 = 105,000 out of 142,000
• C2DE = 37,000 out of 142,000

In conclusion to the BBC Music Magazine the stats show that this magazine has a much wider and more equal readership profile. This could be because the BBC have there own classical radio show (BBC Radio 3) where that and advertise and relate to information in the BBC Classical magazine and also the BBC has very large Advertisement and Publishing Campaigns on their side as Gramophone do not.

With this information and research gathered I would like to analyse the 'BBC Music Magazine' because it fits with my ideas of what I want to achieve with my magazine and getting across to a much wider and younger Audience like the BBC have done.