Examples of specialist music magazine

The following is an image dump of fairly high-rez scans of covers of magazines that can be broadly categorised as specialising in music.

These will be an excellent and invaluable point of reference when you are drafting your own magazine cover for your coursework? Why? Simply put, you receive marks for being as formal and as conventional as possible. While all of these magazines focused on different genres of music, they ALL follow very specific paradigmatic conventions appropriate to magazines. For example, the masthead is, with no exception, situated at the top of the cover.

When constructing your magazine, let your creativity come through your photoshoot, through the colour grading, and through the choice of costume and other elements of mise-en-scene that are situated with your artist.

Some notes on this selection of magazines:

• They are predominantly, but no exclusively British magazines
• They are predominantly modern (last few years) with a couple of cheeky exceptions
• Many of these covers lack a barcode, because they are a digital edition or something. But you still need to include a bar code!
• The brief overrides the examples. If there's something on there which is NOT on a magazine cover you are using as inspiration, you need to include it anyway
• Remember the rule of three: most of these covers stick to a basic three colour scheme. This stops even the ones with many cover lines from looking ugly or cluttered
• You should have three magazine covers open in front of you when you make your own magazine cover. And just do what they do.