Textual Analysis of Sugar Magazine

Researching into what message magazines such as Sugar send out to female audiences is significantly relevant to my project. To begin with, because my topic is investigating into whether or not males listen to music to construct a collective identity to a greater extent than females, these type of magazines being sold suggest that males in fact do. Reasons being that females are almost drawn into having to buy these magazines, which all contain the same content of publicizing the same pop bands, such as Rihanna and McFly. Thus suggesting that females from a young age aren't encouraged to have individual music tastes, yet are twisted into liking the same bands as every other female girl.

Sugar magazine represents an image that suggests all females contain similar interests in idea's about fashion and music tastes. Therefore suggesting that females don't really have a personal identity. For example, straight away the audience notice a mise en scene of Rihanna; a famous pop star. This indicates that a vast majority of the English female population aged 12-16 years listen to music artists and genre's such as Rihanna, and enjoy reading interviews with her. Therefore raising the question that maybe females have similar identity to each other, in terms of style and how they dress.

For instance, when you flick through the pages of Sugar magazine, they advertise similar clothes each month, coming from shops such as Topshop, H&M, New Look etc. Yet they rarely advertise clothes from more vintage or charity shops, which some females would dress from in order to look more individual. Also, to the left of the magazine, there's a headline stating "Celebs share their secrets," which indicate that young teens would actually be automatically interested in celebrities and their opinions. The typography of the actual lettering "Sugar" is stereotypically shaded in girly pink, connoting a very female image. This suggests that this magazine targets a mass market of a sample group of young teenage girls, and automatically assume that females have the same taste in music genre. Therefore as a result, females don't form a constructive identity from music; as this magazine is almost telling them to admire pop artists such as Rihanna, and furthermore only dress in clothes from the high street.

Overall, when you walk into your local newsagents or supermarket and wonder over to the magazines and comics section, you are bombarded with dozens of magazines like sugar. For example, Bliss, Teen Vogue, Cosmo Girl etc, and every single one of them have similar headlines, cover girls and "dippy" story lines jam packed inside them. Each magazine clearly has the same target audience as Sugar, therefore suggesting that a majority of females read these sorts of magazines, and get influenced into liking the same bands and artists as every other girl, simply because there isn't much choice of any other type of magazine to read.