To start off the role of magazine distribution involves working on the behalf of the magazine publisher. They major role of the magazine distributor is to provide their publisher with clients as they are the route to the market for their magazines. Furthermore the magazine distributor allows for the cost to also be lowered due to the economies of scale.

The four primary magazine distributors within the UK, that being Comag, Frontline, Marketforce and Seymour. Comag is a distributor that works with publishers Archant and Imagine who provide magazines for retailers such as Asda’s and WH Smith. Frontline is a distributor that works with publishers Signature and Egmont who provide magazines to retailers such as Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s.  Marketforce is a distributor that works with publishers Magic Box, IPC and BBC who provide magazines to retailers such as Waitrose. These three publishers are all know as “in-house” publishers due to the fact that they have dedicated publisher clients that in essence own the distributors anyway. Seymour on the other hand is a distributor differing to the others due to the fact that it works with the Future and Dennis Publishers that are not “in-house” and don’t offer their services to dedicated publisher clients.

To make sure that I select the right distributor and publisher for my magazine I need to understand what my magazine is institutionally similar to. To gain a greater understanding of this I have looked into some existing hip hop magazines that are already out there and analysed how they are distributed. For example the successful UK based Hip Hop Connection that used to run was published by Future who publish for Seymour distributors. By Hip Hop Connection being published by Future, one of the biggest media corporations in the UK it allowed it to be distribute thoroughly to the correct retailers. Therefore allowing Hip Hop Connection to be easily put into the hands of their target audience.

Another publisher that is used by a hip hop magazine is Townsquare Media, this institution is used by XXL magazine and proves to be successful to this day as XXL is one of the most successful magazines within the USA. This therefore demonstrates that Townsquare Media is a publisher that is able to circulate XXL to their target audience as proved due to their success. However Townsquare is USA based company that only distributes around specific parts of the USA. Therefore using Townsquare Media would only prove to be useful for my magazine if it was to be entered into the American Market which is already dominated by numerous titles. So going with a UK based publisher would be more helpful as the UK seems to not have many hip hop magazine titles around.

Therefore the kind of media institution that would distribute and publish my magazine would be a company such as Future due to the fact that they done an excellent job of circulating Hip Hop Connection magazine to their target audience during the time in which they were distributing it. Furthermore I would use the institution Future as my publisher of choice due to the fact that they are a very big media corporation that works with many other genres of magazine that are also successful within the industry.