NME Contents Analysis

NME Contents Analysis

NME is a indie/rock music magazine, and the target audience of the magazine is teenagers and young adults that enjoy the genre of music that the magazine has to offer. NME’s contents have all the same things as most contents pages to a magazine has, but the big difference is the layout to the magazine. You can see when looking at the contents that it has different sections to it, there are lines separating everything on the page, this is good so it doesn’t confuse you when you first look at the contents page, the narrative device, which separates them in their own sections. The sections are to separate the images from the text, so you don’t get confused to what the caption is for the images, this helpful for the audience so they don’t get confused when looking at the texts surrounding the image. The headline of the contents page ‘Inside this week’ is at the top of the contents page, in bold and in the centre of the page, this makes it stand out and people would see it and would know it was the contents page, because most contents pages have ‘inside this week’ somewhere on the page, so audiences would see this and know it was the contents page, if it wasn’t obvious already. When looking at the different captions, you can see that the typeface is the same, with some of the different captions the same as some of the others, but the caption in the middle of the page has its own typeface that no other caption has, this connotes the importance to that caption, meaning that that image is an important article. On the contents page there is only a tiny section for other things that are in the magazine under the title ’plus’, which is a convention used to emphasise lots of content within the magazine. The small section for the extra things in the magazine connotes that they are not as important as the other images, it’s made the smallest so that you look at it last because the images have more importance to the magazine. The plus section has things like; gig guide, features, versus, live, crosswords and more, this helps the reader see where they are and can go straight to that page when having the page number above it, even though it doesn’t really tell you much about what is going to be on that page.

On this contents page of this NME magazine the images play an important role this is because the images are what will attract the audience to the magazine, and to the different articles, the images relates to the target audience of the magazine. Pull quotes used under all images to emphasises the ‘artists’ voice, for example from the many interviews that the magazine has to offer. On this contents page you can see that there is one main image and other little ones around, the main image has been made a lot bigger when compared to the other images surrounding that one image, this connotes the importance of that image, showing that that article will be important or very interesting to the target audience. You can see that the image in the middle of the page is importance because of it being in black and white, and the other images are in colour, connoting that the image could be really old or the editor is trying to make that image stand out to the rest.

The colour scheme of the contents page is not very interesting, most magazines have 3 or 4 different colours on their contents page, but for this contents page there is only mainly one colour which is black and a tiny bit of white. All the text of the magazine is the same colour, but to show the difference between them, they have made some of the text bold, italic, and changed the typeface, with some being serif and others san-serif, this shows the importance of the different texts and how to show how some of them are more important than others. The page looks like a newspaper, which relates to NME’s history, how before they were a magazine they tried to be a music newspaper. In the bottom right corner of the contents page there is an advertisement for subscription to the magazine, which is a good way to advertise things because it is the first page that the reader sees , and the reader would most of the time read the whole thing because they will want to know what is in the magazine. The subscription has white text because it stands out to the rest of the contents page, because the rest is in black, so this would mean that the reader would look at it because it stands out the most to the rest of the contents page.

You can see that the main focus of the magazine is music because all the images have something to do with music, either its them on stage performing, or a band posing for a picture, or the image could relate to a curtain artist or band, when looking at all the images you can see that the magazine is related to music from the similarities between the images and how they relate to each other. I like the layout of the contents page of the magazine, this is because everything has its own section so you don’t get confused and all the images keep the reader interested in them articles. The only thing I didn’t like about this contents page was that it didn’t have any information on the different features in the ‘plus’ section.