Challenges facing the magazine industry

Technology

With technology developing everyday and increasing in its capability, magazine sales are affected worldwide. The likes of technology today have grown across many years and developed making peoples life's easier everyday. However there have been several factors affected by this development such as magazines. Magazines make a large amount of revenue from hard copy sales but technology is starting to decrease this. Now that technology has become so popular it enables people to access things that they could buy in their local shop or store such as newspapers and magazines saving them from taking a trip out and therefore saving them money. People can now access a digital copy of their favourite magazines online therefore meaning that they do not have to go and buy a hard copy.

Magazine companies have seen this is an issue in relation to their hard copy sales decreasing so therefore the companies have come up with solutions in order to balance the issue out. One solution being that several magazine companies have now created a digital version of their magazine to increase web views and promote their product at the same time as the internet is widely used everyday by users across the world. Without advertising many companies in the magazine industry would have failed due to the fact of increased use of the media online.

Learning from this, I am going to adapt these solutions into my Music Magazine, by ensuring that there is a digital version of my magazine available to download online as my intended target audience is young-adults who are either students or work that will be able to download a copy of my magazine online as they are always on the go.

Illegal downloads

As I stated in the previous paragraphs that technology has developed over various years this can not always be a positive development. Illegal websites provide illegal downloads some at no charge of magazines daily, which has been on going for several years. This can therefore have a negative impact on magazine companies as people will be able to download free copies of a magazine instead of paying for it in a shop or store


Remaining relevant

Remaining relevant is also another challenge facing the Magazine Industry. Magazines are read by customers who want to read what is inside the magazine or customers that have a particular interest to the particular genre of the magazine e.g. Fashion magazine. With the demand of this, magazine companies must therefore make sure that they provide efficient updated content in regards to their magazine as people want to read what is going on around the world daily and if this information is not up to date then customers will not want to buy the magazine thus meaning that revenue i lost.