Billboard music magazine

This is the cover of 'Billboard' a weekly American music magazine devoted to the music industry, especially the music chart. The magazine in general attracts a wide target audience with chart music covering all music genres, just whatever is popular in the particular week. This particular edition seems to be focused around Katy Perry, a style icon and a recent pop sensation,  and appears rather girly and targeting more the female audience. From week to week I think the specific audience for the magazine changes depending on the main image and colour scheme. The female target audience is clear in this edition from the soft baby pink background and floral inspired dress and accessories worn by the very girly Katy Perry. The main image of Katy shows 3/4 of her body, side on with her hands near her heart in a romantic style looking directly at the camera, this relates to the genre of chart music as Katy Perry's  music often does well in the chart and many people are aware of her and she is a well known figure in the music industry. The image is framed with Katy's body slightly more towards the right with the straplines anchoring her curving body, all on the left. She is wearing a little black dress, with a pink floral pattern on and seems to have fake pale pink and yellow flowers draped all over her. This helps bring out the gentle girliness of the magazine and along with her neatly make up face and soft pink lipstick, she does not look at all threatening but instead promotes a feeling of innocence and gentleness towards magazine readers. 

The magazine is called 'Billboard', a billboard in literal terms a billboard is like a large poster advertisement, and so being a name of a magazine could suggest showcasing the latest music releases and 'billboard' magazines help advertise these.  This reflects the content of the magazine by making the reader aware of the latest music and top 100 tunes.  The copy on the magazine cover is all written in either black, white or yellow font and uses a mix of lower case and capital letters for emphasis on particular parts.  The mast head 'Billboard' is written in a simple black font with the middle of the 'b' coloured in red, middle of the 'a' in blue and middle of the 'd' in yellow. This adds more interest and magazine and makes the masthead more unique and recognisable, and quite a statement feature of the magazine. The largest text, other than the masthead, is the kicker 'Katy Perry', this links with the main image and gives a double impact and an instant connection for any Katy Perry fan. Some of the covers straplines read 'Can Taylor Swift's Q4 album debut with a million sold?' relating to music and attracting the female audience with another female artist and it asks a rhetorical question, getting the audience involved and think and answer the question in their own heads. Every little section of the magazine front cover has been carefully constructed, and I possibly a good example of the magazines intended target audience would be drawn towards it straight away.

This is the contents page from Billboard magazine, in the July 2009 issue. The first main focus of the page is the long shot of Hayley Williams(lead singer of the band Paramore) with her arms in the air, spreading the whole height of the page. She looks happy and excited, dressed as a candy cane in the July issue, this is unusual and makes the reader look to the smaller details of the page and they will see how it links to the page heading 'Christmas in July', explaining why she looks so excited. The page has a large heading at the top of the page, immediately showing to the reader it is the contents page. The large black, capital block letters of the word 'Contents' with the broken up style font links with the contents page as it shows how the magazine is broken down into different pages. The page seems to be split up into 3 columns. The left hand side of the page has a column of the pages with page numbers, written in black font with the main headings written in bold, capitals and a larger font, and the subheadings indented under them. On the right hand side of the page there are 3 other images of musicians  in a column, they are all the same size and are quite dark images and allow the main central image to stand out even more. The 3 images have a white number in the left hand bottom corner showing which page the image relates to and allowing the reader to quickly flick to that page if the artist attracts them. The image to text ratio is roughly 2:1 this helps show quite a young/teen target audience as generally the younger the person the less text.

The colour scheme used on the contents page ties in with the masthead of the magazine, the colours used are red, yellow, blue and black. The underline of the heading 'Contents' is the same blue used in the masthead title, which is in the top right hand corner of the page. The bodysuit Hayley Williams is wearing and her feather bower and trainers are all red, this is the most striking colour on the page and again helps show the house style of the magazine.

To the right is the front cover of this particular issue. You can straight away see how this issue of 'Billboard' breaks some of the typical conventions, for example, the masthead is written in white instead of its recognisable black and there are no straplines as such with a much more simple layout. This is a limited edition and attracts unusual attention seeing the different layout and Christmas related things in July.

The cover helps to see the house style of the magazine clearly and the image of Hayley Williams in the same candy cane outfit is one of the key features that the reader can recognise and associate with. Other features include the white background, black text and masthead (as seen smaller on the contents page).