Target Audience Research

After doing some research i have decided that the age range i want my magazine to aim at is 16-26 and the demographic that i want the magazine to be aimed at is B and C1. After deciding this i went round and asked 20 people of this age range what genre magazine they would want to read if they had the choice, here are the results presented in a pie chart:

By looking at this pie chart it was very close between 'R&B/Hip Hop' with 9 votes and 'Indie Pop' with 7 votes. By gathering this information it makes me sure that i would like to do a R&B/Hip Hop magazine as it relates to a larger target audience. One thing i have noticed from this diagram however is that there seems to be a gap in the market in which R&B magazines and Hip Hop magazines are in, this brings up the question of why is there a gap in the market and could i fill it?One thing i noticed instantly from my research about why the gap is there, is because a lot of Hip Hop and R&B music magazines are aimed at the male genre, and therefore i think i should defiantly aim my magazine at a female genre to try and fill that gap in the market. Here is a slide show of music magazines aimed at the male genre.

To find out more information i went around and asked hip hop and r&b fans if they don't read magazines appropriate to their genre because their isn't any around or just because they prefer to follow their music in a different way. Here are some quotes from the research i have done:

 "because i can get the information from watching music channels and going on line" 

"I would read hip hop magazines but i don't know where to find one as you can't get them in normal high street shops"

"I can't be bothered to spend the money on a magazine"

One thing i really noticed from my research further into this subject is that Hip Hop and R&B are taste makers and therefore relates to the two-step flow in the way in which hip hop and r&B followers trust the mediator of the product and therefore want to buy it. The thing about R&B and Hip hop is that it is extremely popular and heavily advertised all around the world by TV programs, channels and festivals, this means that they are prominent genres and therefore widely available for the followers to find, compared to other genre's such as metal music where the followers would subscribe to magazines and websites because the music is only for specific tastes and they have more of a niche market and therefore magazines aimed at these genres are more likely to be bought and read because the fans cant just turn on the telly and the information appears right in front of them like what happens with Hip Hop and R&B; this however came to my interest as i discovered that when turning on the telly you can get such channels as 4music and viva who are owned by Bauer and present the hip hop genre of music, however other channels still owned by the same institution such as Kerrang and Scuzz you would have to subscribe for. This could be because Bauer have realised that they are aimed at a niche market and therefore their followers are willing to pay for the channels where as something like 'viva' the followers are not as willing to pay for and therefore Bauer includes these channels on the free list. Therefore i do think that when creating my magazine i need it need to make it quite cheap so that the readers would be prepared to pay the money for it, but also have exclusive information in it that a TV channel may not have obtained. And finally i think that i need to make my magazine accessible and advertise it, so that i can get out to the niche market that i am targeting and hopefully they will be more aware of the magazine that i have created and buy it.