Target Audience (Refined)

Looking back at my previous blog posts such as the Demographics Research, Reader Profile Research, Existing Products and Market Research I think now have a much vivid understanding of how marketing works. I mentioned that there are certain things an organisation has to do before a business can be established and the majority of it was research; finding out their target audience' needs and wants and using the feedback as a criteria to follow in the production process.

They obtain this information through various means like questionnaires, surveys, customer analysis and so much more. The next thing was 'market segmentation' which I described as the classification of the market or public into sub-groups with common interests which is important as this helps to immediately identify the direct needs and wants of certain audiences. The final one was following 'market trends' as this is a way of observing fluctuations in the markets over a period of time.

Additionally, I mentioned names of well known existing music magazines and researched how often they published them. Most of them publish their issues frequently (weekly, bi-weekly and monthly); its understandable as fans and readers love being informed about things and want to know what's going on, especially in the music industry.

with all of that said..............

Who will my magazine be targeting?

Since my music magazine is based on the Hip-Hop genre I will be targeting young people (typically between ages 16-30) as this form of music seems to have a greater impact on them. Statistics from existing music magazines show that readers are as young as 13 and as old as age 30 with the average age for readership between 21-24. As mentioned before, Hip-Hop is one of the most popular genres in the world today and it is growing at a very fast pace. Young people enjoy listening to Hip-Hop music due to the lyrical composition, its creative & aggressive style as well as the music videos which help to promote these songs. Alot of these artists set popular trends in which these young individuals begin to follow. This takes me back to the use & gratifications research as people have specific needs; the media finds out those 'needs' and produce things relevent to them so that they will be 'relatable' amongst certain groups.