Main task: Detailed analysis of music magazines

Magazine: Tops of the Pops

Genre: Pop, RnB

Audience: Female children and pre-teens whose psychographics would include traditionalists, underachievers and their social value; post-materialists. When it comes to the jicnars scale I’d put the readers under D (semi and unskilled manual workers) and E (the unemployed).

Title: Top of the Pops is generally considered to be a musical item for younger people, especially before it was cancelled on television. It fits into the genre of pop with incredible ease considering it is literally, Top of the Pops. It’s about the best popular music at the moment, although they do tend to pick child friendly artists.

Style: They use a bright colour scheme of pink, yellow, white and black – pink and yellow used in order to attract a younger female audience. The layout of the front cover is quite cluttered, there’s a lot to look at so that the reader is constantly intrigued and never bored – if you don’t like one thing, move your eyes and you’ll find something. The mast head is blocked by the models head, but Top of the Pops is a recognised name in Britain’s musical media so it doesn’t need to be entirely seen, plus the logo for the BBC is at the top right hand corner – a well trusted name.

Content: In a magazine like Top of the Pops you’d expect to find articles and features about major popular music artists (such as Cheryl Cole, Leona Lewis, Rihanna, JLS etc...). These features are not particularly intellectually challenging, it tends to be gossip on mainstream musicians, interviews about what they do on tour, their favourite food, a harmless and child friendly magazine. They also do features on younger girls which tend to enforce dominant ideologies and safety tips, for example: in one issue, there was a feature told from a young girl’s point of view about how she befriended a boy of the same age online who later turned out to be a 25 year old paedophile. This article ends with a moral message to the magazines demographic about how they should speak to adults, another hint that this is a magazine for female children and pre-teens.

Mode of address: In order to address its audience, Top of the Pops uses very informal language (occasionally words/abbreviations which only a Myspace generation would understand) for example; “OMG! Miley takes us on tour!” and the classic teen girl magazine segment of “CRINGE!” The magazine is using this type of language in order to appeal its target audience, it also seems like they’re treating them like idiots, with the constant explanation marks and arrows pointing towards something on a photo, because you know, no one knows where to find a foot. It also tries to suggest that the celebrities they depict are just like the audience, with a few unglamorous photos, almost to give hope to young and self conscious girls in a world where our media demands perfection, although you could argue that these unglamorous photos suggest that imperfection shall be mocked and laughed at.

Photographs: The people you’ll find in the photos of Top of the Pops are famous pop stars (mainly British and American) taken in studios, but a lot are paparazzi shots on the red carpet. They also show the certain clothing they are wearing, for example a member of JLS has Calvin Klein underwear and Miley Cyrus is wearing a pair of classic converse all stars – the latter being a hugely popular footwear product of young people. The representation of males is largely idiotic fools (unfortunate paparazzi snaps) and objects of attraction (posters towards back, as well as a picture admiring a man’s muscles – they are forcing the dominant ideology of heterosexuality upon young female minds). However, females are represented as strong, independent and loving people, for example; Cheryl Cole telling us of her struggle in her early life, but how she overcame it successfully, they’re representing these women as potential role models, women who followed their dreams: “I always kept my eye on the dream.”

Contents page: This magazine doesn’t actually have an official contents page, but instead, because there is so much on the front cover, they put the page number next to each segment.

Double page spreads: As appose to using double page spreads, Top of the Pops uses a lot of centre spreads, in which images and paragraphs are in the middle moving onto both pages. When they do use double page spreads, they have one big image taking up an entire page and an article using three columns on the other.

An example of the kind of music Top of the Pops writes about: