Q3: What kind of media institution might distribute your magazine and why?

The media distributor I would most like to be at the helm of my music magazine would be Bauer media group or Future PLC. The primary reason for wanting both of these institutions preferably to publish my magazine is literally because they are world renowned and huge across the globe, in fact of all publishers they potentially have the biggest and best repertoire of popular music magazines.

Should my magazine be published by either of these institutions along side their already successful collection of related music magazines, it would no doubt achieve high exposure and potential success. It would be drastically more likely to hit the target audience than if it were published by some rare or discreet company.

Bauer Media are a very successful German based media company of whom have a large variety of media products and magazines. They have an impressive selection of some of the best music magazines available, especially here in the UK, with Q, Kerrang and Mojo the biggest highlights of their portfolio.

Due to being the publishers of magazines such as Q which are rock music magazines, my magazine would fit right into their collection, mostly because my own borrows many features of Mojo and Q as it is. It is directed at the same target audience of rock music listeners, and would be a magazine that audiences of Q and Mojo and even Kerrang could easily deviate to reading and adopting. The music style is very familiar with Q in particular, and to an extent the two magazines do fulfill the same purpose and do so in a very similar manner.

As for Future PLC, again my magazine would fit in with their collection due to the similarities they share. Future are a very successful media company who boast an impressive international media empire and who feature music magazines such as Classic Rock, Guitar World and Total Guitar. I would say they would be preferable to a lesser extent than Bauer, because they do not have such high profile magazines like Q or Kerrang, but they do still have a very relevant collection to my own music magazine.

Again, their music magazines are heavily influenced towards rock music, and this is obvious due to the amount of magazines with the word guitar in them. They have magazines aimed at keen guitar players, and therefore this is the audience that I would want to be exposed to, audiences of people who clearly have an interest in the music type that I feature. Another bonus is that unlike Bauer my music magazine would not necessarily have a very popular rival within the group, where as with Bauer Q and Mojo would directly compete with my own for being very similar.

Of course, there is also the factor that because these publishers have many magazines that are similar to that of my own, my magazine would be somewhat eclipsed by them or just another addition to the mix. Therefore another possible choice would be that of IPC Media, as they are not as large however do have importantly the magazine NME under their belt, which is for me one of the inspirations and also follows the same musical and social style as my magazine. For this reason, they would be a good alternative because my magazine could work well alongside that of NME, however, the largest magazines and thus the greatest chance at success are those under the Bauer Media name, but still with this said IPC also have another successful magazine in Uncut, which also again follows the same general style as that of my own. 

Any of the publishers listed above would provide success for my magazine and they all match the tone and musical style of my magazine therefore they would assist my magazine in getting to its audience in the magazine market. They are all successful media franchises and with that in mind considering the reputation that the three of them hold they would be the best possible publishers for my magazine. Certainly, it would make no sense what so ever to use a publisher such as Gramophone, or Wagadon, because their media franchises do not specialize in my musical type. On top of all of this however, Bauer is still the optimum choice.