Magazine Front Cover analysis

'NME 2015 Album Special' Annotation

Context:
New Musical Express (NME) is a British music magazine which has been published since 1952. In the '14th November 1952' edition, NME became the first British newspaper to include a singles chart. In the 1970s, NME was the best-selling British Music Newspaper. The newspaper slowly made a change to a magazine format between 1980's and 1990s. More recently, the online version of the magazine is the worlds biggest standalone site for music - with seven million users per month.

Visual style and overall design:
The visual style of this magazine is quite bold. Red and Yellow are contrasting colours, and are effective in getting your attention, especially to look at the magazine leads. The magazine cover also has a very clear structure to it, the text is layered over the images, and the main cover line is clearly visible to the reader. The text boxes use the same colour as the background, this layering over the image create a relation to the image and the background, avoiding awkward-blockiness. The colour red connotes ideas of strength and high energy. As a result appealing to gender ideals: men should be strong and dangerous. This suggests the magazine has a typical male readership, furthered suggested by the featured artists being all men.

Pictures:
The Cover image consists of 5 very different artists put together, to advertise the '50 New Records' feature. The artist pictures would have come from different professional shoots, and combined to advertise the diversity of music in the article and save money on a new photography shoot. The artists represents the range of different music featured, by the way they are dressed. We see a smart mod suit worn by Paul Weller to a leather jacket worn by Brandon Flowers. This helps to expand the intended audience of the magazine, because a variety of genres are featured. NME has also combined old artists like Weller with newer artists, to expand the targeted age of the reader.

Other features:
NME also uses other typical magazine features to advertise other stories included in this issue. On the right, the artists 'Royal Blood' and 'The Manics' are mentioned, an example of a sell line. Sell lines serve as a way of drawing your attention to other areas of importance, in this case additional possible articles of interest. Another feature used by NME is a Puff, a feature used to provide information about the content of a magazine. On this issue, the puff : 'In the studio, In the Know' is included. This creates ideas of exclusivity, because the magazine is at the front line of music creation.