Genre Research

To find a specific genre to focus our magazine on we began by researching specific styles of hip hop. We knew we wanted to produce a hip hop magazine, but were unsure on exactly what it would be. We were not yet sure if we wanted to focus on a specific genre of hip hop or possibly a specific are in hip hop. If we decided to focus in on a specific style of hip hop we knew we wanted it to be a harder style. We began to research the specific style and some that stood out to us included, trap music, and gangsta rap. We did decide that our magazine would be focused primarily on up and coming artists in the rap industry, what we discussed today is if we would focus on up and coming rap artists in the overall rap industry, or in a specific style of hip hop. 

The idea to focus on only up and coming artists for our magazine was inspired by the XXL magazine's freshman edition. Every year, this is typically XXL's most popular edition of their magazine, showing how wildly popular the idea of new artists is. Since the edition is so popular, we decided we would make a magazine dedicated to this topic, since XXL is the only magazine that does this and they only do it once a year. There is not much competition for this style of hip hop magazine and it has proved to be successful in the past. 

Now that we had a specific area of hip hop that we wanted to focus on, we had to decide if we wanted to focus on a specific genre of hip hop or stay in the overall genre of hip hop. We continued to research the specific genres, but were unable to reach a decision on what we would do.

XXL Freshman Edition