Overview of the magazine industries

There are more than 8000 titles published in Britain, such as the Consumer (general and specialist) – online and sold in newsagents, Business/Trade, for people who work, Customer magazines (which is a form of marketing for companies e.g. ASDA, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and such), Newspaper supplements (the ones that are free with a daily paper), Part works (An encyclopaedia on a specific topic) – These are sold in issues and then builds up as one and also Academic Journals (For university-level students) which would have many discussions on all sorts of topics.

Music magazines are my aim/focus (target audience etc.) so I have collected brief information that may be useful for me when creating my music magazine; Consumer magazines make up the majority of titles on sale in newsagents. They may be general titles that aim to entertain and inform. Such as, Radio Time, Heat magazine and others like them or consumer specialist titles aimed at a specific interest or hobby people might have such as Gardner’s World or Anglian Times etc.

The biggest consumer magazine publishers (2008) – Sales revenue
- Bauer (Bauer publishing): 25%
- IPC (Time Warner): 20%
- BBC Magazines (BBC): 7.8%
- National Magazines (Hearst): 7.3%

Magazines today in the UK:
- There are over 3200 different consumer titles – there were only 1,383 in 1980.
- 1.4 billion magazines are sold each year – The scales for this has changed many times (1970-2.1 billion and in 1992 it was 1.2 billion.
- 85% of the population reads a magazine.
-Advertisers spent £745 million in magazines.
- Consumers spend £2 billion on magazines annually (a year).
- An average of 500 new magazines has been launched every year in the past decade.
- Only 3 titles survived for more than four years