Audience research part 1 (survey)

For the first part of my audience research I created a survey using survey monkey to find out whether people in my target audience read magazines and also what convention stands out the most on a magazine cover as well as other things.

The first question that I asked was ‘Do you ever buy/read music magazines, why?’ 25% of my respondents said yes and 75% said no. These results were as I expected as I find it much easier to read about current music related things online and so I don’t read or buy music magazines either.

I also left a comments section under the first question so that my respondents could explain why they did or didn’t read/buy music magazines. These are some the responses that I received:

Most of the info is onlineBecause I read about singers and bands etc through social media such a short twitter, Instagram

I like having the physical copy as I collect them

they are entertaining and keep me up to date in a traditional way

From the responses that my survey collected I can see that one of the main reasons why people don’t buy or read music magazines is because the information is easily available online. From this question I’ve learnt that my magazine should include things that can be found online as well as new information .

For my second question I asked ‘What is the main feature that attracts you to buy a magazine? 8.33% of my respondents said that it was the contents, 33.33% said the main image. 41.67% said the featured artists and 16.67% said the layout/colour scheme. From this question I’ve learnt that a significant percentage of respondents from my target audience are most attracted to the featured artists and the main image when looking at magazines and that when creating my magazine I need to include artists that are popular and I need to make sure that my main image is appealing to my target audience.

I decided to base my next question on specific artists as it will give me an idea for which artists I can feature in my magazine. The question that I asked was ‘Have you ever heard of any of the artists below?’ with 4 artists listed as answers and a ‘No’ option. 66.67% of respondents said that they’ve heard of ‘Arctic monkeys’ , 16.67% said that they’ve heard of ‘Vampire weekend’ , 41.67% said they’ve herd of ‘Oasis’ , 75% said they’ve heard of ‘Lana Del Rey’ and 16.67% said that they’ve never heard of any of these artists. These responses will help me to decide which artists to feature in my magazine.

The next question I asked was ‘What sort of item would you want t receive for free with a music magazine?’ I asked this question as I want to make my magazine as appealing to my target audience as possible and so I need to know what they would want.

The last question that I asked was ‘What things would put you off of buying a music magazine?’ These are some of the responses that I got:

A badly laid out front cover and also a bad main image

If the image on the cover doesn’t appeal to me

If it’s too expensive and the cover doesn’t appeal to me

These answers have helped me to understand the things that my target audience wouldn’t want in a music magazine and so I’ll ensure not to do these things.