My Reader Profile

Firstly, I created a survey of 10 questions (3 Demographic, and 7 Psychographic) and sent it to a lot of my friends and people in my media class, 

here's what the survey looks like:

Here's the responses I got from the survey

The first thing I noticed was that almost double the amount of females took the survey then males, this showed me I should be aiming a lot of the content of the magazine towards females, but have content that males can also connect with as a third of the readership would be males.

Over half of the people that took the survey were 16, with none under 15, and a few 17, 18, 19 etc. respondents. This shows that I need to aim the content at people that are older teenagers, and feature issues and situations that older teenagers may find themselves in. In order to fully captivate my audience I will need to  have content that appeals to them, some ideas could be (but not limited to):

- More mature music (rap etc.)

- Artists talking about when they were teenagers

- Free concert tickets
- Fashion in the Music Industry
- Information on Tours

The average income for a British family with two adults working is £40,000 a year (Source). The average (midpoint mean) of the respondents of the survey is £55,000, which is £15,000 above average. This shows that the readership would have, on average, more disposable income than the average population, meaning that advertisers of normal (as a pose to inferior) products would be interested in advertising in the magazine, and also the readers would probably be better educated and higher up in Socio Economic Grouping (ABC1)

100% of the respondents told us who their favourite artists were, showing that they're passionate and loyal to their favourites. I put the results into a spreadsheet, and through the use of a scoring system and algorithm I ordered the submitted bands and artists in order of popularity amongst my respondents. 

The scoring system works by multiplying the frequency of people that picked the artist by a number, the number changes depending on weather the people chose the artist as their number one favourite, or second favourite and so on.

- If someone chose artist x as their 5th favourite, the artist would get 1 point. 

- If someone chose artist x as their 4th favourite, the artist would get 2 points. 

- If someone chose artist x as their 3rd favourite, the artist would get 4 points. 

- If someone chose artist x as their 2nd favourite, the artist would get 7 points. 

- If someone chose artist x as their 1st favourite, the artist would get 11 points.

The scores go up by 1 (between 5th and 4th) and then by 2 (between 4th and 3rd) then 3 (between 3rd and 2nd) and then 4 (between 2nd and 3rd).

I put the results into a web page so that they could be displayed on my blog:

To see the spreadsheet in full size, or if it isn't displayed above, please click here. Take the time to look at it.

As you can see by the spreadsheet, on average people's top 5 favourite artists/bands were:

• Arctic Monkeys (Indie Rock / Post-Punk Revival)
• Bring Me The Horizon (Metal Core / Punk)
• Vaccines (Indie Rock)
• Oasis (Rock / Brit Pop)
• Halsey (Electro Pop / Indie Pop)

So looking at the genres of people's favourite music, Rock came up three times, so did Indie and Punk came up twice, so I will base my magazine on one (or more) of these three genres in order to attract the majority of the readership to my magazine. A magazine that features these best is probably Kerrang, which as shown in Question 5, is the second most popular magazine amongst my respondents, followed by NME, which features these genres in it's magazine (but does not specialise in them). 

In terms of gender, the top bands/artists are predominantly male - but in my magazine I'd like to have a mixture of all of the top 5 artists in order to appeal to the most potential readers. I asked 20 of my friends (10 boys and 10 girls) if they saw two magazines, one with a female rock/indie/punk artist and one with a male rock/indie/punk artist on the front, here were the responses:

Artist    Gender	Male             Responses	Female             Responses	Total
Female Artist	4	3	7	35%
Male Artist	6	7	13	65%

So, as you can see by the responses of this sub survey showed that the overall possible readership would prefer a female artist on the front of the magazine, which interestingly juxtaposes with the favourite artists, this could be because of an array of different reasons, like sex appeal for men and women relating to the female artists.

From the information I got from this mini-survey, I'm going to probably have a female artist on the front cover of my magazine.

Add caption

In this question I asked the respondents to name their favourite music magazine, so that i could get inspiration from what my respondents liked. Although the results were hard to analyse I got:

Magazine Name		Number of Responses
NME		6
Kerrang		3
Rolling Stone		3
Q		2
Rock Sound		1
XXL		1
Mod Magazine		1

This shows that the most popular are NME, followed by Kerrang and Rolling Stone. So when I come to designing my magazine, I can look at the content of these magazines and get ideas and inspiration from them.

In this question I asked people to order (1 to 3) how they most listen to music, overall most people predominantly use online services like Youtube and Spotify to listen to their music, followed by people that buy the music from iTunes etc. and then finally, I was quite surprised by the amount of people that actually still bought tapes, CDs and Vinyl Records - but I could use this as content for my magazine (e.g. An article on the revival of records).

The most people (nearly a third) use iPhone, so adverts for apps and accessories for the iPhone, may be quite successful, and competitions to win apps and accessories may attract a large readership. I could also use it to create content such as an article on what phones musicians use, apps for musicians etc.

The results I got from this were:

Brand Name	Description	Frequency
Android	Technology (e.g. HTC)	1
Now TV	Online Film and TV streaming	1
Apple	Technology Brand (e.g. iPhone)	9
Fossil	Clothing and Accessories	1
Nike	Clothing and Sport Accessories	3
Doc Marten	Shoes	5
TopMan/TopShop	Highstreet Clothing Shop	5
Zara	Highstreet Clothing Shop	1
Hollister	Highstreet Clothing Shop	1
New Look	Highstreet Clothing Shop	1
Vivienne Westwood	Designer Fashion	1
River Island	Highstreet Clothing Shop	1
Converse	Clothing and Accessories (shoes)	4
Urban Outfitters	Highstreet Clothing Shop	1
Samsung	Technology Brand	2
Levi	Clothing Brand (famous for Jeans)	1
Pretty Green	Clothing Brand and Store	3
One True Saxon	Clothing Brand	1
Adidas	Clothing Brand	2
Vans	Clothing Brand (Famous for Shoes)	4
Macbeth	Shoes	1
H&M	Highstreet Clothing Shop	1
We Are Cow	Vintage Clothing	1
Asos	Online Clothing Shop	2
Fred Perry	Designer Clothing Shop and Brand	1
Ralph Lauren	Designer Clothing Shop and Brand	1
Drop Dead	Designer Clothing Brand	1
Asylum Industries	Emo' Highstreet Clothing Stop	1
Sony	Technology Brand	1
Bellfield	Designer Clothing Brand	1

So the most popular brands were:

Category		Brand
Technology		Apple
Shoe Brand		Doc Marten
High Street Shop		Top Man/Top Shop
Clothing and Shoes		Vans/Converse

Other popular brands were Pretty Green, Nike, Samsung, Adidas and Fred Perry.

I've created a mood board for the responses:

I've tried to include as many of the brands that my responders said they liked so that I could make an accurate mood board from my possible readership.

The mode was 2, and the mean (average) was 6 (5.85) and the median was 3. Some people say they went to 'too many to count', one responder said '40' (I found the person and they said that they went to 'a gig in hull almost every week, at Adelphi, fruit or another music venue'). This shows that a majority of the readership like live music, so articles, adverts, competitions and other content about music venues, music festivals, upcoming tours etc.

 
The average for this was £120 (£117.60)

The average for this was a lot higher than expected, so thinking it was an error or anomaly I found some of the people the answered my quiz and asked them why the amount they spent was so high. It turned out that due to the way that I worded the question ('how much did you spend last month..')  and it turned out that people had a lot of money during the month of September because of a few reasons, firstly a lot of people had money from summer jobs, people were spending the money they'd saved for summer but hadn't spent, people had bought an unusual amount of new clothes/makeup for college (as they wouldn't be wearing uniform), and also a lot of 16 year olds got money for their GCSE exam results. 

I did this survey question again, asking 27 of my friends what they spend on non-essential items (so excluding food, drink, transport etc.) on average each month, and the average was £45.

Although this was an error, it did show me that the average amount people spend per month changes every month, and that different products should be advertised depending on what month it is (e.g. normal products when people have a high average monthly spending, and inferior products when peoples average monthly spend is lower). And maybe articles about how to listen to music for free (e.g. spotify and youtube) and free music events during the times when people have less money to spend. 

My Reader Profile

So, using the information I have gathered with my survey, I have designed and created a simple two page Reader Profile / Media kit / Media Pack. 

Design your own reader profile for your magazine, include the areas you noticed when researching in to other profiles. Include imagery and statistics (these will be made up accordingly to suit the target you are aiming to consume your product.)

Survey Link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZL86Z7P