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.