Uses and Gratifications

Uses and Gratifications Model Research

The reasons why people purchase music magazines and absorb other forms of the media are quite simple; those reasons would be for pleasure, escapism, information & personal identity.

The reason why people use the media as a resource for pleasure is mainly because they find it entertaining, this is more common in films & television rather than in magazines as films can give pleasure to people by being a comedy and making people laugh or they can be action and people can enjoy the cool effects. When it comes to magazines, the pleasure here would really come from the information you would get, because with magazines, people purchase them mostly so they can find out what is new with whoever is featured. In the case of a music magazine, people would read it to find out all about the musicians that they would consider themselves big fans of and if there is ever anything new going on with them then they would purchase the magazine to find out, and if it is something good then that would bring pleasure to the readers.

For escapism, this would come in through the majority of people, are unsatisfied with life and feel disappointed or let down with some aspect(s) of their life and they would use the media as a sense of escapism, by which I mean if they watch a film then for that short 2 hours they’ll forget all about their problems and just enjoy life. But also a sense of escapism might stem from a sense of envy, if people watch a film that they really enjoy, they might envy the characters in that film for having such great lives, and when it comes to music, the sense of envy would come from those who wish to be a musician and they see their idols living rich, famous, successful lives and would kill for a life like that.

As I already said, information and pleasure would be the same when it comes to magazines, people would get the pleasure from the information they receive. However that might not be the case, if they learn bad news from the magazine then they might not get pleasure from that. However another case for information but not necessarily pleasure would just be from gossip or rumours people hear, if people hear rumours of certain musicians they like then they might buy a magazine that has an article on that musician as they would want all the details on the story. Or even so they might just see the cover lines on the front cover of a magazine that is to do with their favourite musician and they would want more information so they would buy the magazine to learn more.

And finally personal identity would be another way in which people would use music magazines, as it is quite common nature that people will be judged by certain qualities of their personality, mostly superficial qualities, and one of them would be their taste in music. It is quite common for people to be judged depending on their taste in music and a music magazine would help identify that persons music taste and this is usually done due to the fact that people believe that you would be able to tell a lot about a person depending on their music taste.