Audience Pleasures and Attracting an Audience

What are audience pleasures? Audience pleasures are a set of techniques in which a magazine will use to persuade people to buy a magazine and to maintain that readership. These things include freebees, how the magazine is presented and direct mode of address. All of this will be excellent for my music magazine to get a larger audience.

With things such as freebees/competitions, they would sometimes had out something cheap and small or have a competition to win an item if it's something larger. With a music magazine, I could have a competition to win tickets to a gig that is being held by the artist shown on the front or allow people who buy the magazine to be able to have a free download of a song from a new and upcoming band. This will help my magazine as the audience get the sense that they are being given to, which is also another part of the audience pleasures technique. 

I can give away these things by also using a second technique called 'Direct mode of address'. This is when you use words such as 'you', 'you're', 'we' and 'us' to make the audience have a sense of belonging to the community of the magazine and feel apart of a community of people who have the same taste in music, in my case, Indie, Rock and Folk.Another use of language that I can make use of in my magazine is colloquial language. Colloquial language is when you speak 'your own language', which is usually based on slang words - this will speak to the reader on a more personal level.
A third technique in writing to and for your audience is 'semantic field of music'. This is when you use music based words that describe that genre or music. The use of this technique would be brilliant to use as it brings the entire magazine together and draws the audience in, as the words being used to describe are genre based. This imagery is what appeals to our audience to keep them entertained.

Lastly, a method of audience pleasure I can add to my magazine is the information given. Magazine readers like to be given information when they read something and this can be done by interviews. I have already started on a prototype interview, but a few things to consider are how much information has the artist given, does it include things like concerts or recent album releases and finally, does it contain some humour. Humour is a big part of audience pleasure as a magazines main purpose is to entertain the reader. 

Another way to inform the reader is to put inside the magazine either gig guides or festival dates. This could easily link to a competition inside the magazine to win tickets for a certain gig. The guides and festival dates link to music magazines of all genres as at festivals more than 1 band play and therefore more than one typeof genre is played, reaching a wider audience.

I shall use as many of these audience pleasures as possible to make sure that my music magazine is the best and most appealing as it can be, making sure I reach my target audience and keep them.