Wide Audiences vs. Niche Audiences

When deciding on a target audience of a magazine, TV show or any other form of media, there are two different outcomes; a mass audience or a small audience. Mass audiences are for media forms that appeal to a large group of people and maybe have a broad subject/genre, whilst niche audiences are aimed at a small specific group of people which is significantly lower than the mass audiences.

Wide Audience: Case Study - Q

Q magazine is aimed at more mature music lovers and cover recent artists without forgetting the older ones. They cover a diverse range of music genres to interest all. This allows them to build up a larger audience as they are covering more of a variety meaning more people are likely to be interested in different parts of the magazine so buy it to read that part. The National Readership Survey website shows that 476,000 adults read Q magazine which in comparioson to other music magazines on the site, is the highest value. They must base their ideologies on all the music genres so the magazine is not so specific to a certain genre, but holds a sophisticated house style.

Their cover model ranges from celebrities from the pop world like Cheryl Cole and those from the indie scene like the Artic Monkeys.



Niche Audience- SHINDIG!

Shindig is a magazine aimed at people who love music from the 60's like mod, garage rock, psych and freakbeat. This is a clearly much smaller than the market of Q magazine and the audience have to source the magazine from a particular music shop or even the internetm, whereas magazines aimed at a mass audience can be found in supermarkets and most newsagents.Technology has allowed music magaines to be aimed at niche audiences because of desktop publishing software things can be created that look quite professional at a reasonably low cost. Also this allows a small group of people to be employed by a magazine as there is the use of technology that has developed. Due to SHINDIG! being aimed at a very small audience it allows the ideologies and representations of the few genres to be shown, so it will only ever attract those interested in that type of music.

The readership of every edition of this magazine is approximately 26,000 which in comparion to the 476,000 people that read Q, this is a very small market.