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It's an anachronism. It doesn't cover what people want and what the people want is even safer and duller than what they have been covering. The music press as an actual printed medium is finished. Give it 5-10 years it'll be only digital tablet editions or online or a combination of both - which could be a good thing because something new could emerge that does give a shit about music and knows how to present it to a worldwide audience.
Westie has a point about it's readership not being interested in music in THAT way. Like we all were. The kids don't give (enough of) a fuck. It is sad for us but I don't miss the NME as the way I read about music has changed. I gather information and listen to new bands etc online.
Personally I think the NME could have cleaned up if they got their online presence right 10 or so years ago. They could've been the British Pitchfork. For all it's horrible flaws Pitchfork seems to have become the place to be featured/seen. That's what the NME used to be.
Statistics: Posted by Trev — Fri Aug 22, 2014 11:17 am
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The highest figures in the UK were for Mojo which was around 84,000 a month. NME was on 18,000 a week then.
Living in a remote place, our newsagents doesn't stock many magazines, you generally have to order them in which means you need to buy them every week. They get in stuff like OK and Radio Times that have huge circulations, but music magazines they'd only get a couple per issue and only in the summer. So I had Uncut and NME ordered weekly from them for years (despite the fact that I wasn't even that keen on them), but what ended up happening was that by the time they went to press any news and reviews were online anyway. Sites like Pitchfork and so on are taking the share of the audience. NME's website is really poor by comparison and half the articles don't work properly. I think it's just a slide in print sales for the music press all round. If a tiny blog like mine can get over 100,000 hits a month then just think what sites you've actually heard of must be getting.
Statistics: Posted by KevW — Fri Aug 22, 2014 10:43 am
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I personally pin-point the tail end of Conor McNicholas' time as editor as the beginning of NME really trying to push/create it's own stars, rather than heralding the indie stars that the public were rightly or wrongly worshipping. The stars that NME has tried to create/push have been, from a headline/cover story point of view, very boring. And from a pop culture point of view, utterly irrelevant.
Most NME cover stars are old bands flogging reissues, because none of the bands they push are interesting or contentious enough to sell magazines.
Just checking their site and this year, thus far, has seen - Oasis, Manics, Damon Albarn, Primal Scream, The Smiths (twice), John Lennon, Paul Mccartney, Kurt Cobain (twice), Stone Roses, Pulp, Led Zep, Libertines (twice). That's so lame.
Hell, Manic Street Preachers have had NME's cover twice since this July!
That's why no-one's buying it. You wanna sell mags en masse you need scandal, contentious opinions, characters that polarise opinion and invoke adoration or anger.
Statistics: Posted by He Who Hears Horses — Fri Aug 22, 2014 1:16 am
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(yes I know this news was released last week but I was offline for a while)
Statistics: Posted by Bovine Juice — Thu Aug 21, 2014 1:49 pm
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