Analysis of 'Top Of The Pops' magazine

Now that I have decided for sure that I am going to be creating a pop magazine, I thought I should create a blog analysing 'Top Of The Pops' magazine, as this is going to be my style model.

'Top Of The Pops' magazine is a monthly periodical which was first published in February 1995 by the BBC and is most famous for giving The Spice Girls their well known nicknames. The magazine started off as a weekly magazine, but as the readership levels have gone down, the magazine has been changed to being published only once a month. The magazine is based on the television show of the same name and surrounds the world of pop stars. Any new pop artist or band is bound to be featured in 'Top Of The Pops' magazine. For example, the February 2011 issue of the magazine features Justin Bieber, who is clearly one of the biggest pop artists around at the moment. When 'Top Of The Pops' magazine first came out, it was had almost 100% music content, whereas nowadays, there is very little on celebrity music careers and more about celebrity style and relationships. (See earlier posts).
The colour scheme throughout the majority of the magazine consists of the colours white, bright pink, red and bright blue, although each issue has a slightly different set of colours. The name of the magazine runs across the top of the front page with the "of the" part of the name encircled in the centre. Unlike a lot of magazines, the name of the magazine isn't repeated on every page throughout, but each page has the same kind of basic structure, with the page number being in a black semi-circle in the centre of the bottom of each page.

The content of 'Top Of The Pops' magazine consists of a lot of interviews with pop stars, although very few of the questions are actually about their music. For example, in the February 2011 issue of the magazine, the interview with Justin Bieber does not include a single question about his recent singles or album; it's all about how he was bullied at school. How does this have any relevance to music? - the reason for him being famous. The lack of music information is shown all the way through the magazine, with the main focus being on celebrity love lives and the latest fashion statements of female music stars. This causes the audience of 'Top Of The Pops' magazine to be mainly women/girls. The National Readership Survey shows that only 41,000 'Top Of The Pops' magazine readers are male, whereas there are 123,000 female readers. You would expect most of these readers to be kids from around the age of 10 years old up to teenagers of around the age 16. You would also stereotypically expect them to be avid users of Facebook and their Blackberries and to be interested in any type of celebrity gossip. The NRS also shows that the majority of the magazine's readers fall into the C2DE socio-economic category (109,000) and only 55,000 fall into the ABC1 category. This is probably due to the fact that 'Top Of The Pops' is not a very glossy or expensive magazine, and so isn't as appealing to the higher or upper classes.