Music magazine pitch

   Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to present my pitch to you- I believe that I have the perfect formula for a magazine that will be one of the best out there, if not the best!

Title

   My magazine will be called, simply, Uproar! (stylised as UPROAЯ! to give it that little bit more edge). I am sure that you agree that ‘uproar’ is an edgy, symbolic word, connoting rebellion and even self-expression, which are all very important to my target audience of 20-30 year old males.

House style & regular features

   Uproar! will contain a whole plethora of unique, interesting regular features, including gig (we will, of course, refrain from referring to them as ‘concerts’ in order to appeal more to our young audience)  and festival guides, artist and band quizzes, exciting competitions, ‘top 20 downloaded singles/albums, etc’ articles, and interviews of musicians about the most weird and wonderful concerts. To go into a little more detail about two of them, namely the quizzes and competitions. For the former feature, audiences will be able to tweet in questions for us to ask the artists (they will be told who will be interviewed next week in the current issue of the magazine). We will encourage them to come with the most bizarre and funny queries they can in order to make the quizzes particularly exciting! Having this feature will be a definite win-win situation for us and the audiences. More people will buy Uproar! in order to see if their question made the cut, and if it did, those people will get a lot more internet publicity! Research has shown that our target audience is very tech-savvy, being the internet generation, and encouraging them to tweet questions will be much more effective than asking them to mail them in.

   As for the competition… the main, regular one will be a sort of ‘journalist competition’, or more-so draw. It’s simple: you write (or tweet) to the magazine, and are automatically entered into a random weekly draw. Five people will be picked, and will be, in the course of one week, be given free tickets and backstage passes to any three concerts of their choice in the next week. Once they have come back from the concerts, they have to write brief, heartfelt reviews of those gigs, which will then be published in the magazine. Not only will this draw provide people with fun opportunities, but it will also help young, budding journalists with their publicity and portfolio.

   All of these features will make the magazine highly entertaining to read, as well as helping people build social relationships- the latest bizarre questions will be a great ice breaker for mutual fans of the magazine.

Audience

   As I have mentioned, my target audience consists of young adults. As I’m sure you know, young adults do not often have very well-paying jobs- thus, my magazine will cost only £2.00, less than its leading competitor, NME, to make it even more enticing.

   Now, NME has a circulation of about 24,000. Because Uproar! will cover rock and all its sub-genres (and there are many, making the magazine appeal to a wide range of people), I aim to have a circulation of about 25,000.

   NME’s website has, on average, 5.3 million visitors, and I aim to beat that too, setting my goal at 5.7 million. In order to convince audiences to visit the site, I will advertise it in the magazine. The website itself will contain previews and snippets of future articles, a forum for music fans to find like-minded souls, video interviews, a band archive, merchandise sales, and brand new music videos! The magazine will also have several social media accounts (e.g. Facebook) to really appeal to the internet generation.

   Let’s hope Uproar! makes an uproar!

  

Why do music fans purchase music magazines?

Despite a wide, arguably more up-to-date range of information available on the internet, music magazines still remain fairly popular. A possible reason for this is simply a penchant for the traditional- several music magazines (e.g. NME) appeal to an older audience given the artists written about. This audience will have grown up with printed publications, and may be unwilling or unable to pursue the same information on digital appliances. A lot will also be encouraged to buy magazines by nostalgia. Furthermore, fans may feel a certain loyalty to the magazines that they read on a regular basis, and will continue to purchase them regardless on any developments that may allow them to find out the same information, free of cost. Admittedly, there are those who do not necessarily purchase magazines for the articles and reviews. Publications often include full-bleed posters of certain artists, or particular iconic images regarding the music industry. Magazines such as Kerrang! have varying themes every week, often seasonal (i.e. Halloween themed photographs of musicians in late October, images taken at popular festivals). Aside from posters, magazines also sometimes include other free paraphernalia, although less often than posters, given the fact that it is more expensive. Such paraphernalia includes: calendars (included particularly during the New Year period), stickers (particularly in magazines that are aimed towards a teenage audience), and promotional vouchers. Although posters and calendars are the things primarily used to decorate walls, pictures cut out from magazines are also sometimes utilized. Many readers prefer them to simply printing the desired images off the internet due to their glossy quality. Magazines are also much more portable- they can be easily folded up and carried in a bag, and are not much of a loss if stolen, damaged, or left behind, like computers would be. Although the internet can now be reached through much smaller devices such as iPhones, et cetera, it is generally considered easier to bring along a magazine as its owner does not have to worry about a lack of internet connection or the battery running out.