Spin and Rolling Stone What

¶ … SPIN and Rolling Stone

What do you see as the most significant differences between the content, style and look of these two magazines? Provide specific examples from the magazines (properly citing the material you use).

The content, style and look of the two magazines are designed to appeal to their primary readerships. SPIN's content, style and look reflect the energy of the most critically acclaimed bands and emerging stars across rock, hip-hop, soul and alternative. SPIN is also edgier in their content and speak directly to the professional musician, often in a critical voice if their latest recordings aren't that great. . As a DJ, SPIN is invaluable in finding hip hop, house music and rock. SPIN also gets to the specifics of how best to mix songs too, providing lessons learned from the world's top DJs. SPIN also stays true to its values by also having advertising reflect actual musicians using the products they rely on daily for their careers. A content analysis of SPIN showed one of the most accurate representations of black professional men of any musical publication as well (Ainsworth, 89). This keeps with the publications' consistency and clarity of vision.

Rolling Stone is completely different in approach, and has evolved from being focused just on rock-and-roll, encompassing many genres of music today. The tabloid format is more newspaper-like as is the content. Rolling Stone aims for a much broader audience than SPIN, and isn't as edgy and controversial in its editorial tone or investigative reporting. Rolling Stone does provide coverage of new bands and highly-regarded albums, and serves as a good overview of the industry. As a DJ playing hip hop, house and rock and mixing them continually, Rolling Stone provides recommendations for new songs to consider and the story of the artists who wrote and perform them.

2. Based on the editorial and advertising content of each magazine, how would you describe its readers demographically (age, income, race, etc.) and psycho-graphically (interests, values, hobbies, etc.)? Are these magazines competing for the same reader? Or might different people be reading each of them? Explain your reasoning with evidence from the magazines.

After having competed an editorial and advertising analysis of the content of each magazine, in addition to analyzing each website using the free online analytics service Quantcast (http://www.quantcast.com/) (Raab, 24) the demographics of each magazine's readership can be seen. Based on the qualitative assessment and background research of content analysis from previous empirical studies, young men 18 -- 24 are the primary target audience of (Kolbe, Albanese, 19). SPIN is more oriented towards a younger demographic, predominantly male, who enjoys their controversial, direct writing style. Rolling Stone is looking for a slightly older, more affluent readership and ironically picks up more male readers than SPIN. As a DJ, this information is invaluable in seeing how the music reviews and editorial coverage impacts what people at concerns and events I work. Rolling Stone covers the more mainstream hip hop, house music, soul and on occasion, indie bands. SPIN is much bolder in their content and is more effective in attracting younger readers who want to be on the cutting edge of the music scene. Figure q: SPIN Network Demographic Analysis shows the results of analyzing the SPIN website using Quantcast.

Figure 1: SPIN Network Demographic Analysis (Quantcast)

Figure 2 shows the demographic analysis of the Rolling Stone, using their website as the basis of the analysis using Quantcast. As can be seen from the Analysis, Rolling Stone has a significantly larger audience and has a larger percentage of its total audience being Male (71%). Rolling Stone has over double the number of readers as SPIN (as can be seen from the monthly visit figures around the banner of each analysis, 1.3M monthly for SPIN and 3M for Rolling Stone). For additional demographic analysis of Rolling Stone please see Appendix a.

Figure 2: Rollingstone.com Demographic Analysis

(Quantcast)

3. Try to sum up the editorial mission of each of these magazines, and explain how that mission is accomplished in its pages.