TEXTUAL ANALYSIS 3.

Rolling Stone

Front Cover Analysis

 

Rolling Stone was founded in 1967 by Jann Wenner and Ralph J. Gleason, in San Francisco. The first issue of the magazine was November 9th 1967 and has been published every two weeks sinse then. The target audience are fans of music, liberal politics and popular culture. Jann Wenner, of Wenner Media LLC, is still the editor and publisher of Rolling Stone magazine.

This issue of Rolling Stone is themed around the Best rock of 2011, as stated in the headline/banner above the masthead. The iconic red 'Rolling Stone' masthead is layered on top of the main image although they could place the text behind the main image, as they have done in the past, the fact that they have chosen not to shows that they are showing off their high status for this special issue. The cover lines are all placed down the right hand side of the cover, giving an unbalanced design, however also quite simplistic and classy - especially with the Serif font. The cover lines are in white text as it stands out on the background image of the featured artist. The font is fairly large and most of the cover lines contain lures. It is interesting to note that not all of the cover lines are based around music.

"THE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF WALL STREET" suggests a more general/gossip magazine. I have noticed that music magazines have been including features which are not so musically based recently, even 'Rolling Stone' has been using film stars for the cover of their magazines and not just music artists. This tells us how difficult it must be in this day and age to just get by with a simple music magazine in the industry; the public are interested in celebrity gossip and with so much magazine competition, even the most famous and classic music magazines are starting to bring elements celebrity magazines into their own, just to give them the upper hand of a wider variety of information to read from.

The main image is of Adele, the artist featured in this issue. It is a Mid close up of her, so that she fills the whole page. The image is centred as well as the Headline at the bottom stating who she is and also reading 'heartbreak Superstar' reffering to her music, commonly themed around love. There is a misxture of Serif and Sans-Serif font on the page which gives the magazine a bit of a mixup. All the main titles are Serif whilst the lures are in Sans-serif. The cover price of the magazine is $7.95 as it is a very high status magazine.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_Stone