Conventions and Codes of Q Music Magazine

I found out that music magazines are similar but not exact to other magazines such as gossip magazines. I started of looking at the code's and conventions of Q magazine, which doesn’t really have a genre as such but tends to focus on new album releases and up and coming artists.
I looked at the four main elements of magazine's which are layout, image, text and audience profile. Q magazine is male in many way's, the target audience I would expect would be an older man, like 30’s+ who has a general interest in music and buys a lot of CD’s this is because all the bands you see on the cover are either mainstream bands or old bands that are coming out. I think that a younger person maybe wouldn’t appreciate this as much because they might be looking for trendier newer things.
The magazine's colour scheme has colours such as red, black and gold. The images on the front are usually in black and white and have a great amount of contrast. The colour scheme backs up my view that this is a male magazine as the colours represent a male who is quite sophisticated and doesn’t like fussy colours.
The layout is quite simple and clear to see. Everything appears to be in lines, stripes or boxes, this looks very neat and organised whereas Top of the Pops music magazine isn’t very sophisticated and neat at all, which implies that it is for a younger person.
The text of this magazine is mostly all in Serif, this gives a sort of antique and refined look to it. However there is some text on the front cover that is in Sans-serif, the things in sans serif are standing out well, they draw the eye to them immediately because the text looks different from the rest of the cover.
Q’s magazine doesn’t use a very gender specific image which could tell you that it is a mix-sex magazine. They usually use a band whether female or male, but usually male. The images are always black and white which makes a good contrast on the white background and red Q logo. This makes the magazine recognizable so that if you were in a shop you could generally pick it out straight away just by the colour and framework on the front cover.
From looking at the code's and conventions of this magazine, i have found some idea's for my magazine. It has gave me some aspiration as Q has the same music genre as the one I will be using for my magazine, also it has used the same ideas that i will expand on to make my magazine competitive towards other magazine's from the same style of music genre, Pop!