Kerrang! is a weekly magazine, which is published by Bauer Consumer Media. Bauer Consumer Media is a large media company based in Hamburg in Germany. It also publishes Q magazine, another music magazine. It also owns many music channels such as Q TV, Kiss TV and 4Music. This is known as cross media ownership.The name Kerrang! is described as onomatopoeic. It represents the sound made when strumming a guitar. The exclamation mark suggests that the sound is loud and gives impact. This name has connotations with the style of music that Kerrang! focuses on, i.e. rock, metal and emo. Kerrang! is currently priced £2.20 and is readily available in the UK. Kerrang! has now become a brand rather than just a magazine and has branched put into many different areas. There's a Kerrang! website (www.kerrang.com), Kerrang! radio, Kerrang! TV, Kerrang! awards and the Kerrang! tour.
The main type of music covered in Kerrang! is rock, more specifically punk, pop punk, metal and screamo. This covers quite a wide range of bands and styles. Whilst pop punk bands that are featured on the cover such as Paramore and You Me At Six are mainstream, metal bands such as Slipknot which are also mentioned are more niche. As Kerrang! is one of the few magazines to feature metal and screamo bands, it is more likely that fans of these types of bands would buy Kerrang! more often. Pop punk bands appear in a wider variety of magazines and therefore fans of these bands would just buy any magazine they featured in. If we consider the metal side of Kerrang! we would assume that it has a mainly male fanbase, ranging from teenagers to late twenties. The band featured on this particular cover is Fall Out Boy, a mainstream band who music is often described as 'emo.' The colours are quite bright, with white and blue being the main theme. This suggests that despite the mention of metal bands like Slipknot, that this particular issue has more focus on the more mainstream side of bands covered. Kerrang! has the almost scrapbook look to it that other music magazines such as NME also favour. The way the text is sometimes slightly askew and appears in different coloured blocks which almost looks like they've been made on a label maker, makes the magazine looks more random and homemade. This is possibly to resemble or imitate the style of homemade fanzines, which were the early basis for music magazines. However, the magazine still looks professional and a lot less amateurish than the early fanzines. Kerrang! boast that they have an 'exclusive' interview with Fall Out Boy, which will encourgae more people to buy it, as they cannot find out the story anywhere else. This will especially attract fans of Fall Out Boy.
The pictures featured on the cover of Kerrang! are all males, perhaps reflecting their mainly male fanbase. However, they do include arcticles on Paramore, a female fronted band. This male dominated environment is not so much a decision by Kerrang! but more a reflection on how the type of music covered Kerrang! is mainly produced by men. Female dominated groups, such as girl bands like The Saturdays or Girls Aloud, but also solo artist such as Little Boots and Pixie Lott, are often more evident in pop music, a style which is not covered in Kerrang! as they are not the sort of bands that would appeal to their readers and are almost the complete opposite. The lack of more mainstream bands shows that Kerrang! does cater for quite a niche audience, but does not exclude all bands that are considered mainstream. It is more about the style of music than the amount of coverage or radio play the bands get.
Kerrang! popularity can be attributed to its inclusion of more niche bands, whose style of music is maybe reflected negatively in the media and society. Metal bands are not often seen in a positive light. However, Kerrang! praises these bands and by including them with more mainstream bands, shows that they see them on a par with these more 'accepted' styles of music. Kerrang! promotes the metal lifestyle (though not exclusively) and promotes it as a a positive thing, which is unusual.
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