MixMag Magazine Cover

MixMag Magazine Cover 

MixMag magazine is which a monthly club music magazine, which was first launched on February 1st 1983. The publisher of the magazine is Development Hell, costing an average of £4.20 on each issue. Target audience of the magazine is teenagers and young adults, this is because the magazine has a informal layout, and adults would prefer a more formal magazine, another reason that this has a target audience of teenagers and young adults is because of the colour scheme which is bright, and has lots of colours on the cover which will attract a younger audience when compared to a adults magazine that will have less bright colours or none at all. MixMag is a very successful magazine with a circulation of 30,817 a month and a readership of 276,000, it is the biggest selling dance and club magazine in the world. The magazine is a very successful magazine but even with the success the publishers only publishes another magazine that is also a music magazine called ‘The Word’.  There isn’t as many club and dance music magazine as much people think, so there’s not as much competition as average music magazine, for example, rock magazines. You’re able to look at more information on the magazine’s website which is www.mixmag.net.

The colour scheme on the cover is very ‘pop’ like, very bright, which will attract to a younger audience. The colour scheme of yellow, pink and black is used for the writing and also the background of the cover, which catches your eye to the magazine, and would be the magazine that you might first look at in a shop because it is so bright. The pink writing is used to highlight quotes that would attract the audience to the magazine because of people will want to read about things that are coming up, for example, ‘all the top NYE parties listed inside’, and ‘Ibiza free parties’, these cover lines would attract the audience because they will want to know where the good parties are and how good they are.

There is no main image on the cover which confuses the audience to where to look; this is because they want to you to look at all the images that they have instead of just looking at one main image. All the images are related to ‘club life’, all have something to do with it that could include a DJ or people just plain dancing to some music, these images all show the club life. The facial expressions of the people in the pictures are happy and look like they are having a lot of fun, as the images are small and some are too dark to see parts of the image, you’re not able to see a lot of the body language, this is also because some of the pictures have been cropped so you cannot see the body of that person, but with the images that you can see their body language, you can see they look relax and it seems like these images have been taken without thinking they will be on the cover of a magazine, they look very informal. This would suite the target audience because it is informal and for teenagers and young adults you can see this is the kind of cover image that the audience can relate to.  The coverlines are all in the bottom right corner because this enables the audience to look at the images more, the coverlines are so that the audience know what is in the magazine, but are in the bottom right corner because the magazine is very popular and doesn’t need loads of coverlines on the magazine so it will attract the audience, all it needs is the masthead and the images to attract the audience, because most people would buy the magazine anyway because of how well known it is and of how popular the magazine is, people don’t have to know all the time what is in the magazine when it is so popular because they know they are guaranteed good features and articles that relate to club and dance music.
The masthead on MixMag magazine is the same masthead as it is on every MixMag magazine cover, this is because the masthead associates with the genre of the music in the magazine which is club and dance. The masthead at the top of the cover page is bold and not very colourful, this is because if it was bright and colourful, audiences would be confused and wouldn’t know where to look, the colours would become overpowering and confusing to the eye. The strapline at the top of the magazine helps to ensure the audience that they are getting their money’s worth.

With magazine cover you are able to see the major changes on the cover over the years, The covers are all different, but when looking at the magazines all together you are able to see that there are things on the cover that have stayed the same over the years, for example the masthead always stays the same with the colour of the masthead sometimes changing. Ibiza plays an important role on the cover of the cover page, this is because Ibiza is known as club central, showing that the magazine is interested in the club central and telling the audience the things happening in Ibiza, the audience would want to know more about Ibiza and the clubbing that goes on there. Over the years the layout of the magazine changes every couple of years or so, the magazine cover has changed but only small things that you wouldn’t realize about unless you look at magazines over the years at the same time. MixMag for 2010 and 2011 has changed a lot with the main image on the cover, by not having a person on the cover, and having something else representing it, for example, headphones or random smaller pictures scattered around the cover. With the images below you are able to see the differences between the years when looking at the cover of MixMag.

There is direct mode of address from most of the images, half of the images have direct mode of address. In the top left corner of the magazine they say that there is a ‘free’ CD, which they have on a lot of resent magazines, this attracts the audience because they see it as they are getting something free when paying for the magazine. The CD is music that would attract teenagers and young adults to the magazine. On every MixMag magazine they have on the cover coverlines that feature what artists will be in the magazine, this enable the audience to know who will be in it and would just buy the magazine just to read about the artists in the magazine that they like.

When looking at the magazine cover you wouldn’t think that it was cheap, even though there isn’t as much writing on the cover, there is still a lot happening on the cover with all the images. The magazine cover is made of a more expensive material than most magazines. MixMag is a club/dance magazine that is targeted at teenagers and young adults, and you’re able to see this with the layout of the magazine, the images, the coverlines, the masthead, and the headline. The magazine is structured in a way that would relate to the target audience, and MixMag does this in the perfect way.