The website will continue but the free print magazine has been given the bullet. The last paid for edition was in 2015. I could not tell you the last time I bought it, but I thought the new version could have worked.
The format was to blame IMO. A weekly music news publication is a nonsense in the digital age. They should have switched it to monthly and focused on big interviews. There's plenty of music print titles - few with the level of brand recognition NME has - that still thrive.
Getting a copy of the free version outside of TCOTU was also a struggle. Anytime I looked for it in Glasgow, you'd be lucky to find a six month old edition lying on the floor of a record shop.
The format was to blame IMO. A weekly music news publication is a nonsense in the digital age. They should have switched it to monthly and focused on big interviews. There's plenty of music print titles - few with the level of brand recognition NME has - that still thrive. .
Yeah I definitely agree. The likes of Q, Mojo & Uncut are still going strong (as far as I know anyway). I wouldn't be surprised if someone decides to re-launch it as this in the future, seeing all the headlines & artists commenting on this today shows how important the brand/name still is, I'm sure someone with some money & some common sense could turn it into a successful monthly publication.
I loved it from around 2000-2005, it was a great time for young guitar music & I think the NME played a huge part in helping break those great U.S bands (strokes, white stripes, yeah yeah yeahs...) & I certainly was influenced by a lot of the bands that they championed.
My one enduring memory of the NME was flying across the atlantic in 2003 with a leaked copy of elephant and picking up the NME with a review of the album and a big interview with Jack when I went into HMV on oxford st the next day, and reading it and listening to the album in the basement of whatever hostel I was staying at that week. It was jarring to actually get the NME the week it came out, since they were always 2-3 weeks behind in Canada.
I think my favourite NME moment was that 2001 interview with Oasis post 9/11. A proper big interview, great pictures, written in a great style by (I now realise) Sylvia Paterson. Magazine journalism at its finest which you just don't get reading a blog on your smartphone.
It's been dead since about 2004 since it started flogging the dead Libertines horse. They were so desperate to be a part of another scene they tried to invent that horrible TCOTU's Burning thing claiming that The Paddingtons, The Others and more even worse bands were the saviours of guitar music.
nme was absolutely huge for me in the early 00s whilst i was at 6th form especially.
i kept on buying it fairly regularly for far too long tbh and if i remember rightly was still buying it occassionally right up to the point where it went free. don't think i picked up a single issue since the first free one though as it just seemed to be completely void of any quality journalism and more akin to heat magazine.
sad times though. i think the difference between nme and uncut/mojo etc mentioned above and why those magazines are still going is the target audience. mojo and uncut were always the old man muso mags and the type of people who still buy print media. nme was always aimed at teenagers and teenagers just aren't buying print media anymore and also for want of a better phrase "indie kid" teenagers that would typically buy the nme just don't seem to exist too much as a subculture anymore.
It's been dead since about 2004 since it started flogging the dead Libertines horse. They were so desperate to be a part of another scene they tried to invent that horrible TCOTU's Burning thing claiming that The Paddingtons, The Others and more even worse bands were the saviours of guitar music.
I think the real problem is what came after. They bet the house on male indie rock bands, and when that scene inevitably died and became landfill indie, they were left exposed.
It's been dead since about 2004 since it started flogging the dead Libertines horse. They were so desperate to be a part of another scene they tried to invent that horrible TCOTU's Burning thing claiming that The Paddingtons, The Others and more even worse bands were the saviours of guitar music.
I think the real problem is what came after. They bet the house on male indie rock bands, and when that scene inevitably died and became landfill indie, they were left exposed.
The Libs and scene around them were great til early 2004 but none of the bands around them were really any kop, let's be honest.
I actually do The Others a bit of a disservice. If any of the bands had anything about them I guess it was them.
I think the real problem is what came after. They bet the house on male indie rock bands, and when that scene inevitably died and became landfill indie, they were left exposed.
The Libs and scene around them were great til early 2004 but none of the bands around them were really any kop, let's be honest.
I actually do The Others a bit of a disservice. If any of the bands had anything about them I guess it was them.
I think that's probably always been the case with the NME and it's ilk though hasn't it? It's never been a legacy publication, it's always been a new music (duur!), press type thing and they stumbled across/helped to facilitate a number of different movement/scenes over it's history. The fallout of that is that inevitably in any scene, you will always have the pioneers and then the copyists that come after them and when you're in the midst of that thing, it's understandable that the NME would throw itself into those second wave of bands, it's natural.
I remember the first copy of the NME I ever bought must have been around 99/00 and was full of bands from the arse end of Britpop and Nu Metal. As already mentioned, it's clear that the Internet just killed the print media in that demographic, that age group just aren't arsed with buying a weekly news magazine, when everything in it is already days out of date and being beamed to their hands instantaneously while they're having a shit.
I still have a few editions somewhere at my parents, I used to keep every copy and by the time I moved out I had stackloads that I just had to throw out, I went through and kept a handful of editions for posterity, stuff like the Libertines first cover edition etc.. I'll have to try and dig them out sometime.
to earth with love was their big song wasn't it? just listening to it now, not bad tbh...very supergrass...but that name! they were never going to get anywhere with that where they?
