Thinking of a concept...

First of all to make a successful music magazine, you have to make it look good and you want the audience to look take a first glance and flip through the pages. This varies between the design layout, typography, colors and whether or not there is a well recognized person on the front cover. Furthermore, famous people are often preferred to advertise the magazine because it could draw the attention of many. To extend this, the front cover of a music magazine must have a powerful story which varies between different genders of music. Likewise it must have an image relevant to the "big story" which leads it to benefit the audience.

Another key element to making a music magazine successful, is for you to look at other magazine designs over 5 years and see what they all have in common. you can find this sort of information is on the Society Publications Designers website, in addition to this you can look on the American Society of Magazine editors Top 40 Magazine covers of the last 40 years. you can use this for ideas and inspirations for things such as font, color and images. With this, you can look at various types of writing techniques to use in your titles, headings and sub headings, for example using alliteration, rhetorical questions and possibly the rule of 3. Also try and limit the number of cover lines because otherwise, people wont have time to pass by shops and read the contents and possibly buy the product. To help this, you could use descriptive words and adjectives and not to overflow the cover with text.

Also you have to choose a good picture which is relevant to the story and also make sure that the background is simple so that it doesn't make the magazine unattractive and doesn't make the colors clash. Otherwise you can use a simple picture but you could edit or manipulate it so that it can surprise and get the readers attention. In some cases this is more effective because it describes the story without the use of images. another thing that i noticed on most magazines, was that they had different competitions depending on the genre of the magazine. this is good because the audience have the chance to get involved in the music industry and maybe meet their idols or stars. This also gives the chance to the audience to show what kind of work they produce, which then leads to the company or industry hiring them and make a living out of it.