Music magazine - Institutions

What does a magazine publisher do?
Publishing is the process of production of information or literature for others to read. This is done to make information available for public view.
In some cases authors may be their own publishers meaning that the author originates and develops the content and then also provides the media to deliver and display the content in the public view.

Publishing traditionally refers to the distribution of the printed work of books, magazines or newspapers. With more digital information systems now becoming available such as the Internet, publishing has now expanded to include the electronic resources such as electronic versions of books, magazines, newspapers as well as websites, blogs and video games.

Publishing includes - the stages of development, acquisition, copyediting, graphic design, production and marketing. So therefore distributes the newspapers, magazines, books, literary works, musical works and deals with the information including the electronic media.

How is the publishing industry organised?
Concentration of the media ownership is typically owned by a small number of conglomerates and corpoerations. Media ownership may refer to big business monopolies which are businesses which own a large proportion of the market. Large media conglomerates include Disney, Viacom, News Corp and Time Warner.
These large conglomerates own the most of the market which therefore makes it difficult for smaller companies difficult to start up as they cannot compete with the larger companies due to money and sales.

The publsihing industries are owned by these corporate industries. Adorno suggested that these industries are culture industries to generate formulaic, simplistic and emotional products. This makes a wide variety of products available for the audience. However, these products of the culture identieties then create false needs for int he audiences. These needs are then both created and satisfied for the capitalist system where money is the only reason for all these production and sales and the people beniffiting from this is the big company owers at the top of the business wheras the audiences are losing out as they have to pay out for all these products which they think that they need but in the end they are just spending more of their money on products which they don't need.
For example Trinny and Susannah's TV programme 'What not to wear' is made wuth a basic narrative structure of the programme where it features a problem where a person with 'poor' dress sense and low self esteem is on the program showing how they don't have the best clothes and what to feel better about themselves. This is then resolved by the person going to high street shops to purchase lots of new clothes with Trinny and Susannah's expert guidance so that they then feel good about themselves. Throughout the program you see the change in the person from being sad and upset about their lives at the beginning but then at the end once they have bought all there new clothes they feel better about themselves and have more self esteem. This then generates the audiences' desure to purchase these particular clothes so that they can then feel better abou themselves and feel that this will serve their psychological needs. People therefore continue to work, selling their labour, to earn enough money to buy these clothes which will allegedly make them happy - therefore giving more money to the big business owners supporting capitalism again.

Adorno then argued that these culture industries have developed even further with the improvements in technology with the inventions which have helped to control the audiences' thoughts on what they need to have i their lives. He said that the radio has turned all participants into listerners and subjects them into broadcast programmes which are all exactly the same giving out the same ideas that material goods are what is needed to make the audience happy.

According to Adorno, media and music products are characterised by standardisation and pseudo-individualisation.

For example, whilst Westlife, Boyzone, Backstreet Boys and *NSync seem different, they are not only generically similar to each other but also to the boy bands of the past, Take That, East 17 or A-Ha. Each group may have a ‘unique selling point’, but essentially they are just the same.

How is this evidenced by the ownership/publication of the New Musical Express magazine?
IPC Media is a leading UK consumer magazine publsiher. Over 26 million adults read one of the magazines produced by IPC media.

IPC provides a diverse print and digital portfolio which offers something for everyone. They own over 80 magazines which include Pick Me Up, Woman, Now, Rugby World, Nuts, NME and Country Life. IPC's digital properties include NME.com and housetohome.co.uk which is the UK's first homes portal. IPC's brands are at the heart of the UK's cultural life.

IPC is then owned by Time Inc. the publishing division of Time Warner Inc.

The variation of types of magazines available with IPC media produces. This shows how the thought of what foes into each of the publication of the magazines is clearly made just for the money and to attract a wide variety of audiences to read the magazine and therefore in turn make more profits for the business. This then shows how the editors of these magazines are just set to a strict stereotype so that they can sell magazines and may not even believe in teh things written in the magazine themselves.

To be able to publish this amount of different types of magazines produces under one company, the compay is then set up into many different divisions to accomodate for all these different magazines.

IPC Media groups titles under five magazine divisions: Connect (women's weeklies such as Now Magazine and Look), Inspire (leisure and specialist), Ignite! (men's lifestyle and entertainment), SouthBank (women's lifestyle and home interest) and TX (portfolio of television titles). In addition, there is Marketforce, the UK's leading magazine distribution business. Digitally they have WOTV and goodtoknow.

What are your initial thoughts about the fact that NME is published by IPC media?
Since finding out about NME being produced by IPC media it puts serious concerns over the things said in the magazine and the image that they are trying to create of an indie-cool magazine even though they are owned by a large conglomerate at the top. This makes the integrity of the brand less realistic and reduces the integrity overall of the brand. This ownership by IPC shows how the key function of the NME magazine is too getting money from the sales.
They create implications for the audience as it shows that it does not copy the indie cool theme of the magazine when they are all manufactured by a larger company and have no control over the input of the magazine.

Who published the magazine you analysed yesterday?

Record collector magazine;
It is produced by metropolis, which is another large media company in which they produce lots of different magazines on finance and landscapes etc.
Record collector is about all the different parts of rock and roll over the years and they advertise what CD’s to buy or books, posters memorabilia to buy on the different bands.
This ‘rock’ stereotypes created by the producers of this magazine is again just a way to appeal to the audience and get money from the sales of these magazines.
It is similar to IPC media but does not have the larger scale of the amount of sales that IPC has because they sell fewer types of magazines compared with IPC.


Are they part of a horizontally integrated media conglomerate?
These companies are part of a horizontally integrated media conglomerate because this is describing a type of ownership and control. This strategy is used by different businesses to sell types of products in different products in different audiences to create a larger profit scale overall. This is seen in the media as being very productive by having these large companies at the head of the publications. This is done by putting the media into the other fields of media such as not only are newspapers printed for sale but they are now also put online so that it can reach an even larger audience than before.


What do you consider to be the implications of this business structure for your magazine?
The implications of this business structure are that it creates monopolies where the main businesses own most of the market sales so makes it difficult for small companies to compete. Also it makes the issues said in the magazines as very similar so do not get a wide variety of opinions from the writers so the magazines will become very similar. So the magazine will become very similar to other magazines that could be bought so will create a competitive market as the consumers will only choose to buy one product.