History of Billboard Magazine

Brief History: As the world's premier music publication, Billboard has served the entertainment business since 1894, headquartered in New York with bureaus in Los Angeles and Miami, and has editorial correspondents in major cities around the globe.. Beginning as a weekly for the billposting and advertising business, Billboard and its popular music charts have evolved into the primary source of information on trends and innovation in music, serving music fans, artists, top executives, tour promoters, publishers, radio programmers, lawyers, retailers and many others.

Billboard.com features an extensive array of searchable, playable charts, breaking music news, artist interviews and exclusives, news, video and more. Launched in 1995 as Billboard Online, 'Billboard.com' now attracts ten million visitors each month in more than 100 countries and has become in effect the  digital destination for popular music.

This diagram that a vast majority of the readers (68%) are college graduates which would indicate that this magazine would have quite a young audience of about 14-19 years old who are most interested in pop music therefore would be the most likely people to buy it. I have also found that people in the 'C2' category of society would be more likely to buy it because it is accessible to them and with a price of £3.50 so it is affordable for that income bracket which has proved popular because there is a total readership of 48,000. The content of this magazine is typically the 'Billboard top 200' so the top 200 songs of the year as well as the charts and new and upcoming artists from different countries because they believe in the industry everyone should have a fair chance. In different issues there may be certain articles about different genres of music as well as articles with different top artists.

Billboard is a pop magazine therefore it would have a pop ideology which I explained in one of my earlier posts.

Who is the typical Reader and what is the typical content? The target audience of Billboard magazine is females who are aged 15+ because they are most likely to be interested in popartists such as rihanna, Beyonce, One Direction etc.. which is entirely relevant because these artists feature in this magazine. They offer their rwaders a variety of special features such as; Podcasts which are about the celebrities that are focused on. 'Billboard 200' is also fearured which is Billboard releasing the weeks best selling albums.

Producer and distribution: From my background research, I found out that ‘Billboard’ magazine is published by Prometheus Global Media, which also publishes many other well known, American magazines such as Ad week, The Hollywood Reporter, Backstage, Media Week and many more.

House Style of the magazine: Billboard’s house style for this issue of their magazine is kept quite neutral and all similar colours and the font is the same for the cover lines and the masthead but the main cover line is in a different font to catch the reader’s attention. In this edition, they use a layout which places the celebrity o the right hand side of the page giving people a chance to see the 'CARLY!' title first.

Again the Celebrity is in front of the Masthead so I will also be using this strategy in my magazine to show that the celebrity/musician is the most important thing on thing on that page.