Music Magazine Industry in the UK

In the music magazine industry there are more than 8000 titles published in Britain. The catagories include; consumer which are sold in newsagents, business/trade/professional for people at work, customer magazines that organisations give to their customers, staff magazines to inform them about their company, newspaper supplements which come free, part works which have a set of issues and lastly academic journals which are for university-level discussions. The consumer magazines have general well known titles for entertainment such as "Cosmopolatian" or consumer specialist titles that are set to a certain topic such as "Horse and Hound". The biggest consumer magazine publishers in the UK (by 2008 sales revenue in newsagents) have 4 main companys the include; Bauer Publishing holding 25%  of shares, IPC (Time Warner) holding 20%, BBC Magazines holding 7.8% and National Magazines (Hearst) holding 7.3%, This giving the rest of the companys to hold 39.9%. This is known as oligopoly which means domination of a few companys. The world of commercial media is characterised by a high degree of  concentration of ownership. There are over 3200 different consumer titles  today in the UK and 1.4 billion magazines are sold each year and it is known that 85% of the population reads a magazine. In 2008 is what seen that advertisers spent £745 million in magazines this showing that magazines rely highly on the advertisement procuded within the magazines. An average of £500 new magazines have been launched every year in the past decade however only 3/10 of these titles survive for more than 4 years shows the industry to be very volatile.