Top of the Pop magazine cover

Top of the Pops magazine cover analysis 

One magazine that I will use to use for a cover analysis is Top of the Pops, this magazine will provide me with knowledge of a different music genre. The target audience of the magazine is girls aged 10 to 15 years old. Top of the Pops is a hybrid magazine, with music, fashion and beauty. With Top of the Pops magazine, the main genre of the magazine is pop music, because it is mostly about artists or bands. Top of the Pops is published by BBC Magazines, which is a supplementary magazine for the TV show Top of the Pops, which in the past was a very successful brand. Other magazines that BBC Magazines publishes are: East cook, Countrylife, Top Gear, Good home, It’s Hot, Balamory, and Bob the Builder, BBC Magazines publishes a verity of different magazine genres, that the target audience arranges from, pre-school, pre-teen, teen, to adult. Top of the Pops was first published in February 1995, the price of the magazine is £2.20, and it is published every month, even though the magazine costs £2.20 it comes out every month and it is a reasonable price for the target group as they have disposable income. With the magazine you are able to look at more information on the official website for the magazine, this is because the younger audience use online media a lot and prefer to use the internet than to read the magazine. Official website is http://www.totpmag.com/ and on the publishers website which is http://www.bbcmagazines.com/.

With the cover of Top of the Pops magazines you can see there is a brand identity with the masthead, the masthead is always the same font, but with this issue of the magazine it is different, this could be because it’s a new year and the editors of the magazine are changing the brand identity of the magazine. When looking at the old mastheads of the magazine you can see the similarities between them, the only differences for the masthead is the colour of the masthead, which changes with each issue. The house style of the magazine is that the magazine layout is always the same, the magazine cover always has pictures of posters that will be included in the magazine, There is always a main image of a teen idol on the cover, that is most of the time a medium shot of them, always cropping the waist down from the famous teen, this is because female readers aspire to representations of celebrities. When looking at the cover of Top of the Pops you can tell that it is that magazine when looking at it because of the layout that that magazine always has, the magazine always has a medium shot of a teen idol, and on the cover of this issue you has Selena Gomez a actress, most well known for her Disney work. When they put someone like Selena Gomez on the cover of the magazine it would attract a large audience of more girls because they will be able to relate to her and she shares the same target audience as the magazine.

When looking at the masthead of the Top of the Pops magazine and looking back at previous Top of the Pops magazine covers, you can see there is a difference, but with Top of the Pops they change the style of the magazine often, so even though they are well known they don’t cover some of the masthead like other magazines do when they are well known. They change their style of the masthead, but they keep a style for a long time, when looking at the mastheads of the images bellow you can see that they

are the most commonly known, these are the only mastheads that they have used, but the most well known is to cover to the far right. The colour of this issues masthead is blue, the use of the colour blue for the masthead is to keep with the colour scheme of the cover, with some cover lines and headline in blue, they use this colour because the main image has a blue belt and flower on the headband, this is so that the colours are able to blend.

There is a main image of Selena Gomez, a singer and actress, the readers would be attracted to this issue of the magazine because they will want to know more about her, and the advice she would give. There is a headline saying ‘follow your dreams, fame and fashion advice from Selena’, this looks like it is signed by her herself, so people will know that she is actually giving advice about fashion tips, and her name is highlighted in blue, which is a personal mode of address to the readers, and which attracts the eye of the reader, and readers will want to know what advice someone has that is famous. The cover lines on the cover are spread around the main image,  ranging from true life, celebrity gossip and advice, all very different but would attract a large audience from the various different articles in which you can look at, it reflects the hybrid nature of the magazine. With the cover lines they will use ‘omg’ and ‘sizzling’ to make the reader would why that coverline has ‘omg’ next to it, and will want to read the article to find out more. Exclusive is used on the cover to draw views to the magazine, and in this issue the exclusive is about one direction, and because the target audience of the magazine is girls aged 10 to 15, a lot of girls will want to read the magazine because of just that exclusive. There is direct mode of address from the main image, and most of the smaller images around the main image, and in the headline which says ‘follow your dreams’, so this means that the audience can relate to the magazine, which plays on young readers ambitions.

The colour scheme of the cover is blue, yellow, black and white, each colour is used for separate different things. The blue is used for the masthead, and used to highlight things that the editor wants the audience to see, for example, boys, dreams and names of famous singers of actors. Yellow is used to also highlight things like numbers, and the text used about one direction. Black is used for the less important text that isn’t as important as the text around. White is used for some of the coverlines in which have a dark background. All the colours on the cover are used for different things but all help the cover stand out from each other. The colours are connotations of the age of the target audience, they represent the age as the colour would attract a young age group.

When looking at this magazine cover, your able to see how the magazine uses representations of the young audience. The magazine cover shows how nearly everything on the cover relates to the target audience, and your able to this through the colour scheme, the main image ect.