History of Music Magazines

Kerrang is a rock music magazine that was produced by Bauer Consumer Media in the UK. The magazines name is onomatopoeic and its refers to the sound of a power chord on an electric guitar.

Kerrangs first issue was in 1981 on the 6th of June. It had ACDC as its first ever cover artist. It was purely devoted to the "New Wave of British Heavy Metal". In the 1980's to the 1990's it had several Glam and Thrash metal bands featured on the cover such as Motley Crue and Bon Jovi. However that slowly changed into the grunge era when huge bands such as Nirvana rose to fame. Kerrang was criticised however, for featuring bands on the front whenever a new musical sub culture was around for example at the release of Purple Rain, Prince was put on the front cover. Currently. Kerrang have a lot of emphasis on sub cultures such as "emo" and "metalcore", purely because pictures of the band "My Chemical Romance" was on the front cover for several weeks.

The successful period for Kerrang, was when bands such as Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit were around. Which entered the "nu metal" era. When the editor for this time period left to go and work for Q there was a new man called Ashley Bird who was later fired because there was a decline in sales for Kerrang because of the end of Nu Metal.

(1982) You can tell how old this is because of the person on the front. There is only one picture and very little writing on it. The only writing on it is the list of bands at the side. Its very simple and comparing to magazine covers nowadays it just looks old. The masthead is quite plain, and the only way you would recognise it is by the name not by the font or the colour.

This magazine cover is a little more developed. Its starting to feature more subheadings on the front, and it has more than one picture. It still looks quite old judging by the fonts. The masthead is very simple and is quite easily done on a word document or something similar. The writing actually on the cover is very difficult to read. You would have to look rather closely before you actually got what it says.

This is a more advanced and modern version of kerrang. The masthead is a lot more exciting looking, instead of something that is done on a simple microsoft document on the computer.

Survey Questions

1) Would you like to see a magazine that is devoted purely to the women in rock?

2) If you had any choice of names would you go for the interesting ones like Kerrang or the normal ones like NME?

3) What do you want a magazine to tell you about music?

4) Is women and rock a good way to go in terms of people buying it?

My survey is trying to find out if my area of interest is a good way to go or if it would just go down the drain. I also want to know what would be better for naming my magazine as? If it would be better to go in the kerrang naming direction or if its better to go for just normal words. The questions above are sample questions that I've thought about.

Planned Photoshoot

For the front cover of the magazine I am going to use a variety of pictures between ones I have taken before at gigs and ones that I want to work on and plan myself. For example, I am going to use my friends Naomi and Adam for the actors in it because they both would fit the style I am looking for. I have not really decided where I am going to shoot it, it'll probably be at my house or outside. I want to take something with high contrast in it with lots of black and white in it, but I still want to have the light colours being lighter and the dark colours being darker. I think that if it is highly contrasted it will look more powerful and more interesting for the younger readers.