Overview of Magazine Industry

Today, the magazine industry isn’t as prominent as it was in previous years. The print industry seems to be declining whereas the e-media and social media side seems to be ever evolving. Magazines are a centre point of discovering genres and acts as a way to communicate and express yourself through music or shared interests. To combat the magazine’s industry decline, leading music magazines including NME and Kerrang! have launched online and digital versions of the magazine, containing the same content in a digitalized package. The magazine has a wide audience and a wide range of purposes. There are over 8000 published magazine titles in the UK alone. These magazines can classify in under seven different types of magazine.
 1. consumer (general and specialist) sold in newsagents and available online;
 2. business / trade / professional / B2B - for people at work;
 3. customer magazines that organisations to give to their customers as a form of marketing;
 4. staff magazines to inform staff about their company
 5. newspaper supplements - come free as part of daily or Sunday paper;
 6. part works - a set number of issues builds up into an 'encyclopaedia' on a specific topic;
 7. academic journals - for university-level discussion of all sorts of arcane topics.

 My music magazine would be a consumer magazine. The majority would be sold in specialist music shops and the leading entertainment retailer, HMV. The magazine is a consumer specialist as it ties down to a certain interest – rock music. The biggest consumer magazines are Bauer Media Group which accounts for 255 of publishing including Kerrang!. Time Inc. , formerly IPC-Media own 20% of the market followed by our license-fee paying BBC magazine with 7.5%.

 Overall, the magazine industry, despite an average of 500 new magazines have been launched every year in the past decade. Only 3 out of 10 magazines that are released last on the shelf.