Research - NME - Rate Card

NME is the longest published and most respected music magazine in the world. It has many awards for its success and has grown to be the biggest commercial music news magazine and site in Europe. So why are they so successful?

If i am going to produce a music magazine with an inch of NMES success i need to learn about what they do and why it works for them. The best way to do this is study their rate cards so that i can understand who reads their magazine, which will lead to me understanding the potential market that i will be entering.

The price of NME is £2.20 which tells me that this is the price their consumers are willing to pay for the magazine. From this i can begin to understand what the magazine is worth and i can value my own magazine against this. For example i could try and become a competitor of NME by selling a music magazine with similar content but selling it a cheaper price. NME is sold weekly which shows they produce a magazine with current information as it is published every week. One of the decisions i will have to make is how often i publish the magazine. I could publish a magazine weekly as NME do , Or i could decide to publish it less often but make it bigger with more content. There are two problems i could face if making the decision to publish the magazine monthly. The first is that the content i publish may not be 'new'. For example i could print an article about a new band but because it takes a month to be published , a magazine such as NME who publish a magazine weekly , may also cover the story but before mine. This would lead to them producing a magazine that is more up to date than mine. Some music magazines are published every two weeks. Therefore i would need to conduct some audience research to make a decision about how frequently my magazine would be produced.

NME has a circulation of 56,284 this means that on average, this is the number of copies it disitributes, for each issue. The magazines readership is 411,00. These figures effect whether other companies will want to advertise on their piece of media. The average reader of NME is Male with 73% buying the magazine. This in comparison to the 27% of women that buy their magazine justifies why their target market is men aged 17-30. When creating my music magazine i will have to consider who my target market will be.

NME say that their readers are 'techno savy'.

They say this as this would appeal to companies involved in technology and make them want to advertise in NME. On their rate card NME list some statistics about their readers so that other companies can understand whether it would be worth advertising in NME. For example as NME is targeted at mainly men , it is unlikely that Rimmel make up would choose to advertise in NME as not many women would see the advertisement. However by using statistics such as ,72% of their readers have broadband internet connection at home, would appeal to companies such as AOL as they are aware that the readers of NME have an internet connection and perhaps they could advertise their latest deals to persuade them to change their broadband supplier.

NME's rate card is effective as it informs other media distrubters about NME and whether it would be worth advertising in their magazine