Music Zine, Early development

Here is some early development for my music zine, firstly I've looked at budgeting and what I would need to do in order to keep the budget down. If it's to be sold at shows, I can't imagine someone purchasing it for anymore than what they'd pay for an E.P. so we're looking at a price of around £3 per magazine. Making a profit isn't important (due to the anti-capitalist agenda of the scene), but ensuring that the money is recouped is significant. This means that there would always be an incredibly small print run (20-30) maximum, the format would have to be relatively small (A4 is twice as much to produce as A5 etc.) and conform to a standard format; Cropping and such would lead to paper wastage and would be a poor investment. I also have to consider a cheap paper stock such as newsprint. I don't really want to use college's newsprint because it's yellowish, so finding a cheap white newsprint, or a few different cheap paper stocks is imperative. Also, to reduce cost, it's best to reduce the zine to a 1, or 2 colour print, probably 2 to give it a little more flourish. Considering the length of the print run, and the desire for a 'DIY' feel to it, screen printing seems the natural choice. This gives me a lot of room to experiment with the colour choices too.

I started thinking (quite unsuccessfully) of lo-fi music gear and out of the things that I thought of, a cassette stands out, as does the unmentioned in the photograph above, 8 track recording gear. Both would provide an interesting image to play around with for the cover. I'm going to buy a load of cheap cassettes either online or in charity shops and then play around with compositions using them. I need to teack down an 8 track too and see what I can do with this. These different compositions can then work as different covers, so that's something to work with. Close up shots of instruments are also something I could work with.

I also started thinking of names, the ones I'm most sold on so far are Cassette, or The Cassette because it sounds like gazette. And also Lo-brow, a reflection on both lo-fi and low brow as in low brow culture, which reflects the themes of the magazine quite well. It also sounds like no-brow a publication company I quite admire.