Comparison Of NME and Tops of the Pops front covers

I want to find existing music magazines to see how they have designed there front cover  to appeal to there target audience. This is so I can get ideas and inspirations for my front cover. There are many ways in which music magazines can appeal to there targeted audience and this can be by the use of images that are used, typography and colours. Therefore by researching a existing music magazine, I will gain a better understand on how they attracted there target audience.

I researched the popular music magazines called NME and Top of the Pops. Both are very popular magazines which attract a different type ofaudience to each magazine. NME promotes Rock and Punk music while Top of the Pops mostly promotes Pop music to the younger generation. I have created a table for the similarities and differences for both contents and Front cover page.

Differences and Similarities on The front cover:

Similarities	Differences
Both Magazines have quite a plain background colour to not over-power the Main image and main Headline. White is a balanced colour, and is very simple and gives off clean cut images of both magazines. White is not a bias colour, and can work with any type of image which is on the front colour of the Magazine.	Colours: Tops of the Pops uses a variety of bright and colorful colours to attract there audience who is young teenage girls. The colours are symbolic to the target audience because most teenage girls likes the colours pink and purple, and this attracts them to read the magazine However NME uses Bold appeal to symbolizes the range of different artists which are shown in the magazine. Red, black and white are contrast colours which attract the readers to read the headlines which are on the Magazine. Red is used as it is a bold colour which indicates maturity to its readers and this corresponds to the magazines target audience who are of an older audience.  Black and white fonts are use to  the magazine so that font is easy readable so this makes there target audience buy the Magazine.
Both magazines uses Main images to attract there readers into buying the magazine. Tops of the pops has a large image of Teen pop sensation Justin Bieber. I think that having Justin on the front of the cover attracts the audience but his fan base is mainly of teenage girls, therefore the image will attract teenage girls reading this specific magazine. NME uses a main image of 2 people from the Group Oasis. Oasis is an older generation band whose main audience is off the older generation, therefore NME know that there target audience are more likely to read this magazine, and not Pick top of the Pops due to there audience not relating to a new generation of newer pop stars. I think both magazines uses images of a different generation pop stars because they have different audiences, and there audience will like who the Magazine is interviewing. I think that both pop stars relates to the Magazines audience because both there target audience are at ages of the Pop stars and they find the stars relatable.	Both magazines uses one main image, however Top of the Pops has a variety of different Artists pictures around the magazine. These images are a lot smaller then the main image, as these images are slotted around the magazine.  This is used so that there target audience can look at the pictures and know that there is an article about that Artist inside the magazine. However NME only has the main image on the front, and this is because the older generation of the magazines likes to read articles, however the younger generation prefers to look at pictures with a small amount of text.  Both magazines cater’s to the audience by doing this, and this keeps there audience enjoying what is inside both magazines.