Picture from John Barry
I finally got round to picking up (out of a combination of pop culture commentator duty and morbid curiosity) the first free edition of the one time giant of music news the NME. I'm not sure if this is the year-zero issue one or whether it is a continuation of the final paid for issue but it doesn't really matter. The NME was for a time in everyone's life (up until nowadays) the go-to publication for finding out about the music you didn't see in the mainstream media, they were the first magazine in this country to report on Kurt Cobain's death in the days when you had to wait until the newsagent had it in to find things out. It's weird to think that in my lifetime we have gone from waiting for the newspapers to catch up to having the news appear instantly rendering print media a little sluggish. We have in the last few years lost a lot of printed magazines covering new music yet the NME somehow limped on. It is said that it was always more fun to work there than have to read the thing but it was a lifeline of sorts for kids in rural areas who couldn't get to gigs as often as they would like. At first I wondered if the NME becoming a free sheet would alienate those teenagers today who didn't live near a branch of HMV but it doesn't matter because they can get their music news on their phones and have probably never read anything on paper.
As convenient as it is to be able to read the news at the touch of a button, I wonder if it is really worth it. Reading a proper newspaper or magazine is easier than reading an article on your phone because you don't get your view blocked by a barrage of adverts and videos. Incidentally the NME website (along with the Nottingham Post) are the two websites I will not bother with on the phone; you could click on an article, put your phone down and go to the shop for a paper, make a sandwich and a cup of tea, sit and read the paper from cover to cover with your sandwich and tea and maybe the article will be ready to read on your phone. As for sites like Buzzfeed and all the copycats like Newslinq, forget it, I don't know one person who has ever got to the end of a piece.
Becoming a free paper isn't necessarily the end, Metro does pretty well and the Evening Standard still has a good readership in London, as does the legendary Time Out so as long as you can pay your way with advertising you should be okay. Content is the key which is something that has had an effect on Nottingham arts paper Leftlion, once a quarterly publication and now monthly. Either it is still as popular as ever which is why you can never find it these days, or they don't bother printing as many which is why you can never find it these days. Either way they have, I would imagine, realised that filling a monthly magazine isn't as easy as filling a quarterly as the content has suffered. Reading the new NME one wonders who it is aimed at, they always dipped their toes in the pop world so having Rihanna on the cover isn't the biggest problem, (although I have never forgiven her for the weather during the summer of 2007) the problem is the identity crisis they seem to be having. The 'M' stands for 'Musical' but according to the badge on the front cover they now represent music, film and style for some reason. This is like how nobody remembers that MTV stands for Music Television, you get the impression that music is something of a hindrance for them.
It isn't the move to becoming a freebie that will kill the NME, it is the fact that the NME is drifting along without direction and lost its relevance along the way. I picked up a free copy and have written off for a refund.
The Hockley Hustle Practice Run can be viewed here.
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September housekeeping
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