Music Magazine Industry

There are more than 8000 magazine titles published in Britain alone and only 3 in ten of these titles survive more than 4 years this shows that the media industry is very volatile. These titles can be categorised into 7 different groups: Consumer (general and specialist) - sold local newsagents as well as often being available online, Business/Professional -for people that work and the trade that they work in, Customer magazines - usually created by big organisations to give to customers, Staff magazines - to keep staff informed in a company, Newspaper supplements - which come free when you buy a newspaper like Sunday Newspaper gives it's readers S Magazine, Part works - a series of magazines which you can collect to create a set like an encyclopedia etc and Academic journals - for university-level talk about specialised topics.

However, Consumer magazines make up the majority of titles that can be found for sale in local newsagents. There might also be general titles that try to entertain and inform such as Cosmopolitan or Consumer Specialist like the Horse and Hound which target an audience who have an interest in a specific topic/hobby like gardening or knitting.

There are four major consumer magazine publishers which are Bauer (owns around 25% of sales revenue in newsagents), IPC (20%), BBC Magazines (7.8%) and Hearst (7.3%), these figures are from the 2008 sales revenue in newsagents. Due to consumer magazines sales revenue being dominated by a few companies it is called an oligopoly. The world of commercial media is characterized by a high degree of concentration of ownership. A similarity of these magazines is that Bauer, IPC and Hearst all have several womans gossip/lifestyle and tv orientated magazines.

Although circulation of the magazine is important so that the magazine is distributed effectively advertising is also very important as the advertising revenue provides between 10% and 50% of the magazines overall revenue. This is created by advertisers buying advertising space in particular parts of the magazine. Some advertising spaces are bigger than others which is why an advertiser will pay more for an advertising space on the back cover or inside front than the middle of the magazine.

Due to having an interest in music magazines I looked to see which publishing company owns what music magazine that I often see on the shelves of newsagents and supermarkets.
NME, Teen Now - IPC Media
Q, Kerrang - Bauer
As you can see, the majority of succesful music magazines are either published by Bauer or IPC Media.