The document discusses the results of a survey about music magazine audiences. The survey found that most respondents were students aged 18-25 who have low purchasing power. As a result, they prefer cheaper magazines priced between £2-3 and tend to buy Kerrang! magazine the most. While they expressed interest in magazines like NME, their actual purchasing is affected more by price than content preference. The survey also revealed that interviews are the most attractive section for readers compared to things like news, reviews or promotions.

1. Audience Research
By Victor Chi-Chung Chan

2. Aim of this survey
By asking questions in these directions:
• Understanding what are the people who buy these music magazine.
• What kind of music magazine they would like to buy.
• The purchasing power of the audience.
• What kind of contents they want to get form the magazines.
Therefore, we can design our own magazine that fits the specific
audience with the specific contents.

3. 3
Planning:
Before asking questions, we must design how do we ask
to get the most efficient results from the audience.
Basic information:
Gender, age and
occupation are essential
before asking any
question, so that we
know what kind of
people are we asking.
Tendency:
By asking them what do
they want without any
premise, to understand
what do the audience
like.
The actual situation:
By the personal limits,
the moods of them in
buying magazines might
have changed.
Such as:
What magazine do they prefer.
Which price is reasonable.
Such as:
What magazine did they
actually buy.
How much do you spend
for each magazine.
Comparison
Conclusion:
Then we will know what do
they prefer and how are they
affected by other factors.
Compliment questions:
Some simple questions are
not comparable but
useful.

4. Survey Results
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5. What is your gender?
This question can tell what does the
data in the following questions reflect.
Different genders may have different
attitudes or taste towards music. I also
want to know what gender would like
to do this questionnaire because it may
tell whether they are interested in
music or not.
Total 41 people answered this survey.
The responses are quite satisfying as
the ratio of male to female are quite
balanced (3:2), so the following data
are able to reflect both genders of
audience.
Since they are not exactly the same, so
the data tends to reflect the attitude
of male.

6. Which age range are you?
Different age ranges can reflect their
orientation towards music. Some music
genres are defined as ‘old-fashioned’,
such as classical, and some of them are
new in this generation, such as pop. By
this question, it decides our target
audience of this project as we know what
they like.
From the result, it is revealed that age
range 18-25 dominates, which has 26
people out of 41 (63.41%). Under 18 is the
next which is 31.71%. The least is 26-35
which has 2 out of 41 (4.88%). We may
ignore them since they are the minority.
By calculation, the mean value of their
age is ~18.02, so the data reflect the
young adults. Then we may focus on the
audience around 18.

7. Which of the following best describes your current occupation?
Occupation is related to the age, we can
guess what’s the age range by their
occupation, vice versa. But this question
also reflects the purchasing power. We
assume that the more purchasing power, the
more money they would spend on magazine.
Also the career directly tells how much they
earn.
In this survey, total 29 people are students
(26 of them shown in the data, 3 of them
commented ‘student’ in the bar), around
70% respondents are students. So we can
assume the overall purchasing power of
them are quite low since they would not
work full time so they don’t earn much.
Combine the data in last question, we can
assume most of them are under higher
education. They are knowledgeable, but
they may not like to buy music magazine
very often.
Students

8. How often do you buy a music magazine?
This question shows how often did they
actually buy music magazines.
It reflects two possibilities, their attitude
towards music (how much they love music)
and their purchasing power. The more often
they buy means they have higher purchasing
power or they love music.
In the following data, most respondents
never bought any music magazine or
irregularly, each of them is more than 30%.
After them is ‘once a week’ which is 14.63%.
The data is quite extreme, they seem either
not buying or buying quite frequently.
The main reason we can estimate according
to their age and occupation. Since most of
them may not have much purchasing power
so they are not willing to buy music magazine
regularly. They would not even buy them due
to the internet can deliver all the
information in the magazine.

9. What genre of music magazine do you usually buy?
After knowing the data about how
would they spend money on music
magazine, then we want to know their
expectation in music magazine. By
asking them about their favourite
genres, we will know what kind of
magazines they would like to buy.
According to the data, the most popular
genre is Rock, 60.53%. After that are
Pop and Metal, which are 42.11% and
26.32% respectively. These three genres
are viewed more likely popular to
teenagers and young adults. This is a
quite expected result. Instead, the rest
of them are classical, jazz and country
music, those are viewed boring, or old-fashioned.
Therefore, the genres of magazine I
focus on should be Rock, Pop or Metal.

10. 10
What music magazine do you prefer the most?
(Seven is the most, One is the least)
Different magazines focus on different
genres of music and also target audience.
From these options, mostly are for
teenagers or young adults. Only ‘others’
could include non-British magazine. Due to
their similar genres, the respondents may
like many of them. So they were asked to
arrange those magazines by how much
they prefer.
The rating of them all are quite high.
Possibly the respondents are mostly
British. NME is the most preferred (4.83),
followed by Metal Hammer and Classic
Rock (4.63), then Kerrang! (4.54). These
four magazines are the most preferred by
young adults. The rest of their rating are
lower than 4, the reasons can be estimated
by the following questions. So far we know
these four magazines attracts them the
most.

11. What music magazine did you actually buy?
There are magazines they prefer, but ‘want
to buy’ and ‘would buy’ are different. So
this question might tell what’s the
difference between they prefer music
magazines and they do actually buy it.
According to the result, almost half of them
have never bought of them, followed by
Kerrang!, which has 39.02% support. The
rest of them are lower than 20%. The results
are quite unexpected, the magazines they
prefer are different to the magazines they
actually bought.
That can be conjectured as the price
decides what they buy. Since most of them
are just students, may not have much
purchasing power, so they don’t buy music
magazines. Then the price of Kerrang! is
quite cheap, that’s why they would buy
Kerrang! rather than the others.
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12. Comparison: Their tendency and their purchasing power.
From the last two questions - ‘What music magazine do you prefer the most?’
and ‘What music magazine did you actually buy?’. We do see the content and
the price of the magazines do affect what would they buy. NME, Metal Hammer,
Kerrang! and Classic Rock seem to be the most popular magazines in this survey,
so we now compare the difference among them.
Kerrang! has the least popularity among these four but most people have bought
this magazine. Of course, the probability that some respondents randomly answered
this survey is not excluded. People would like to buy Kerrang! may be due to their
attractive covers, or the cheaper price. NME has the similar price to Kerrang! but
that’s probably NME doesn't focus on a specific genre (Rock, the most popular genre
in their age range) like Kerrang! does. So the respondents would like to buy
Kerrang! instead of NME.
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13. 13
Which price range is the most reasonable for a regular music magazine?
This question directly reflects their
purchasing power, which also directly
decides them whether buying this
magazine or not.
The results is quite predictable. People
tend to buy magazines with cheaper
price, especially the price range -
£2.01-3 is the most chosen one
(30.77%). Then options - ‘below £2’,
‘£3.01-4’ and ‘£4.01-5’ share the same
percentage (20.51%).
It answered to the question why
Kerrang! is the most people bought.
Because of its cheap price - £2.20, so
they would like to buy it. The result
also suggest the purchasing power of
students is quite low as expected.

14. How much do you spend for each regular music magazine?
This is a similar question to the
previous one. It estimates that is
t h e i r consumption on music
magazines reasonable as they
expect.
The result is quite optimistic, the
cheapest options - ‘below £2’,
‘£2.01-3’ and ‘£3.01-4’ share the
same percentage (25.64%) and the
data are quite similar to the last
question. They also tend to spend
less money on music magazine.
The reason due to the price of each
magazine would never be so
expensive. They almost cannot find a
magazine with £10 or above. Also
they are only students, so they would
not spend so much money on music
magazine.
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15. 15
Which section of a magazine attracts you the most?
This is a complement question. Because the
whole survey focuses a lot on what genre,
what magazine they buy, or how the price
affects their decisions. But this question
wants to know what’s so attractive to them
in a music magazine. This is more likely a
comparison between the contents in a
magazine.
‘Interviews’ is the most chosen option, which
has 42.5%, followed by ‘News’ and ‘Reviews’
are 22.5% and 17.5% respectively. ‘Promotion
of products’ and ‘Gig guide’ don't seem
attractive to them.
It reflects people tend to get informative
contents in a magazine. Especially interviews
are usually exclusive by the magazines, so
they can only know the conversation by
reading the magazine. But reviews and news
they can read by other resources. So even
though they are important but still not
attractive as interviews.

16. Conclusion
In this survey, we found the characteristics of the audience that helps
us design our own magazine.
Most respondents are students and young adults around 18. Males are
more than females about a half. So the purchasing power is quite low
due to they focus on their study instead of working, their income does
not support them to buy so much non-essentials.
As a result, they tend to buy cheaper magazine, even the quality is not
good as they expected. Or they don’t even buy magazine.
But not all the phenomenon can be explained by its price. The
contents in a magazine also affect them. Possibly due to the
convenience of the Internet to them, the importance of magazines to
spread the news has been weakened. So the audience tend to read
more exclusive articles/interviews instead of news.
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