magazine cover of deconstructions 1

‘Monsters’ known to the music industry as the name Lady Gaga calls her millions of fans that will be running to their local shops and supermarkets wanting a piece of their idol on the front of a magazine that doesn’t normally follow pop stars careers. But, Lady Gaga is hard to get away from as she is constantly in the limelight for both good and band. This means good business to NME as they are expanding their audience for this issue both pop and rock listeners will buy this issue. The popularity of Lady Gaga will be a huge success to this issue as profit margins may just increase in ‘monster’ strides through her fan base. This magazine targets new readers as well as the usual readers. The image is in direct mode of address, where the person in the image is looking straight at the reader. The direct gaze helps simulate interaction with each individual reader. The image of Lady Gaga is a medium shot, and takes most of the space on the front cover. On the other hand this should not put off weekly long term buyers as there is something for everyone as we can see through the straplines a list of bands ranging through many genres of music. I believe NME has something for everyone.

The masthead the logo usually positioned right hand corner at the top of the page is there to promotes a brand as that is the first thing we see when looking upon magazines. However, Lady Gaga’s head is covering part of the NME logo indicating that Lady Gaga is bigger than the brand NME. Especially as all eyes are on her revealing body whilst she is seductively indicating to audiences that she is sexual as she is placing her hand upon her breast, maybe NME is trying to create another target audience for this issue on the verge of a ‘Loaded’ type of cover, that would bring in young men.

Three main colours dominate the cover; blue, yellow and black. A pattern occurs that the colour blue highlights the most crucial words such as: Lady Gaga, NME and may other artist in the sub headings. I believe Lady Gaga is now at the most powerful stage of her career she may be the big star like a sun the use of yellow indicates to us she is the bright spark in today’s pop music and can be compared to as big as the sun in terms of the charts. Yet the blue keeps her on her feet and not get too carried away, as the blue captures the real true information and the real Lady Gaga, this issue will unveil the true Lady Gaga. The colour of black gives the issue the mysterious look to it that we don’t know what to expect from this raunchy pop star.  Although I think this is the intended purpose as NME don’t want to reveal the whole magazine in their cover. They leave the audiences wanting to dive into the magazine especially as the cover lines offer people so much more which they need to learn so much more about.

The sub heading teases the audience by explaining very little of what is in the issue. However it explains the enigma. In this issue they’ve used bands like RadioHead especially when Radiohead are beginning a backlash that will stir some trouble, people by nature like controversy, also used are  Arctic Monkeys and The Libertines this allows NME to gain many audiences. As fans of bands want to know what is inside about them.

Key information allows the audiences to gain key factual information of the brand and issues such as barcode, price, date and issue number. This classification helps identify a magazines image. The word unzipped gives NME a sexual impact other than only music, the effect is simple it creates a sexual heat between readers as they want to see Lady Gaga ‘unzipped’.

The cover has a very raw quote, asking the audience a question, this stops readers in which they have to think the answer and to know the answer they need to read the whole story and in doing so they have to buy NME. This quote works as an advertisement for what kind of interviews there is inside; ‘ I AM NOT FULL OF SH*T, ARE YOU?’ this power question with a swear word within contains a powerful image of NME and the way it wants to be identified as and that is not your average magazine. The way it is in capital letters draws the audience’s attention that there is serious issues involved in this issue, the importance factor adds value to the magazine.