Research - Music Magazine Covers

Here is an example of a popular music magazine's front cover from 'Rolling Stone'.

I really liked the initial idea of this front cover as it stands out from most music magazines. The magazine manages to incorporate allot of typical conventions; for instance the main focus of this front cover which includes a leading caption that dominates the page . This fits in with the content of the magazine as it is a music magazine and has featured a well known female artist 'Taylor Swift'. The image is in direct address which helps to invite the reader into the magazine, this also represents the main advertisement for the magazine and as 'Taylor Swift' is a well admired celebrity this cleverly increase sales as audiences would want to read about her. However the Header of this magazine has been covered by the artist which is generally not a typical convention but this is because of the popularity of the magazine that its audience would know what the magazine was. This is something that I would not include in my magazine because it is new to the music magazine market. The text that is included on the cover of this magazine is its subheadings - all of the subheadings are placed at the right side of the magazine and do not cover the leading caption but are still very noticeable to the reader. Each subheading includes at least one famous musical artist, which again entices the reader into the magazine as they are also getting information about many other artists. This helps link into the theme of a music magazine as it is mainly based around the modern musical artist. The piece of text that is most visible to the reader is 'Taylor Swift' with a strap line underneath - 'Secrets of a Good Girl' this makes the reader want to open the magazine as they would want to no what this meant about the artist as it doesn't give away to much information for the reader to understand what it means straight away.