One music website that offers an interesting slant on the focus of music publications and in particular those that have a niche genre and audience is Vibe. The former CEO Keith Clinkscales has said “We don’t think of ourselves as a Hip hop or R&B magazine. Vibe is a music magazine, the way Rolling Stone is a music magazine... Vibe’s goal is to be as important if not more important than Rolling Stone.” (S.C. Watkins, 2005, pg 56) Yet despite having this objective and belief when looking at the website itself the largely predominant if not only race found within the site is black. For a magazine with the tag line ‘Redefining Hip Hop’ it may be expected that the main target audience are young black males and females, and the publication caters for this well. Yet with the idea of creating a place where Hip Hop and R&B is not solely stereotyped or targeted towards a black culture there is very little to highlight a white target audience, or even news stories involving a mix of both white celebrities as well as other races. In terms of representation Vibe represents a black audience well, the adverts for the website show black actors and artists, yet the there is little found to represent a white audience, the thing being a mention of ‘Paris Hilton’s top sexiest photos’.
So when compared to the Rolling Stone website, it is quickly obvious that the two show almost complete opposites in terms of their representation. Rolling Stone includes video clips of white male fronted bands, as well as news about white acts, however there are snippets of news surrounding acts such as Rihanna and Run Dmc. What Rolling stone manage to do, that differs from Vibe, is keep the classic rock genre that they are renowned for as well as incorporating other forms of genre.
Bibliography:
www.Vibe.com
www.RollingStone.com
S.C. Watkins, Hip Hop matters: politics pop culture and the struggle for the soul of a movement, Beacon press, 2005, pg 56
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