End of another music magazine - the old model crumbles.

Does anybody care? Hundreds of views for this thread but not one single comment. Does anyone still read the NME or Mojo? I know the interest in music online seems to have vanished - Record of the Day closed their message board down; Velvet Rope is dying. We used to have ten times the visits to the Tip Sheet board compared to Your Views; now it's the other way around. Twitter and Facebook have music as a very low priority.

Why? Specialisation? Does music now have virtually no mass appeal?

Your thoughts. if you care.

The main reason (from my point of view) is the fragmentation of the media/the audience.

And music is nowadays (only) something which is (always) on in the background, but (almost) noone is listening to or (really) cares about.

I just think it's become more specialised.

Personally I love albums - Prog Rock and Zappa.
And there are new releases of both - Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree for 'prog' and fantastic new unreleased live albums from Zappa
You spend all your time saying albums are useless and only pop is important

Not all my time; I love all kinds of music but feel singles are essential and under rated whereas albums are often awful and only highly rated because of profit.

Classical; concept; collections - all are fine by me. But albums encourage self indulgence and low quality.

I don't think we need to resort to the fragmentation cliche. I liked The Word but the simple fact is that it - like so many other mags these days - was over-priced. I can buy a paperback book for the price of one copy of The Word, Mojo, Q or whatever. If these magazines were around £2.50 I'd buy them regularly. £4.50/£5 for a monthly mag is too much.

When I was a teenager, around 15-17, I would buy smash hits religiously every fortnight, because it was the only place where you could read interviews with your favourite bands, and see glossy pictures. Later on between about 17-22 I read NME, Melody maker, and Record Mirror. There are many reasons why people don't buy music mags anymore. Partly because similar material is availble elsewhere on the web or on tv. Also with the current economic crisis buying magazines is not a priority and thus they must be sacrificed.
Kids these days grow up thinking that music is free and anything related to it shouldn't be charged for, including magazines.

The reason is the NEW MODEL and no JK you haven't quite got it yet.
You are using newish techniques or the old model (singles, hit songs etc)
but you are skating with the new model but are being blinded by the old model ideals.
Ditch the old model once and for all and you will enjoy the benefits of the new model
in its totality.

The new model is essentially about the FREE dissemination of media. Free to the consumer
of course. Similar to TV. The TV industry is a billion dollar industry yet apart from
the TV licence to the BBC is free at source.

Magazines, records, CDs, downloads are ALL part of the old model. Leading with them is a
mistake. They should be secondary products after one has connected with the artist.
The argument over albums v singles is irrelevant. The new model is more about episodes
and the serialisation of art. If you do an album that's up to you but singles make better sense
because they take less time to make.

Look at non music acts on Youtube such as Ray William Johnson and Jenna Marbles as your model.
Alex Day I believe is 80% there and actually was there until he/JK flirted with the old model
at Christmas (with great results) and is now focusing on sales rather than the subscription model.

JK ditch the music industry they are on a plane without fuel and will crash soon. Focus on Alex's
ideals and less emphasis on selling downloads, iTunes and all that. Revolve around the episodes
of Alex's music and it will snowball from there. Yes touring is going to be vital but I think you
are going to do well out of that.

As far as magazines are concerned, why read 3rd hand copy of your artists when you can hear directly
from them. Magazines are doomed. It's all online now and online = FREE baby!

Some good points J&B - worth consideration.

robbiex wrote:
When I was a teenager, around 15-17, I would buy smash hits religiously every fortnight, because it was the only place where you could read interviews with your favourite bands, and see glossy pictures. Later on between about 17-22 I read NME, Melody maker, and Record Mirror. There are many reasons why people don't buy music mags anymore. Partly because similar material is availble elsewhere on the web or on tv. Also with the current economic crisis buying magazines is not a priority and thus they must be sacrificed.
Kids these days grow up thinking that music is free and anything related to it shouldn't be charged for, including magazines.

There is a whole generation out there that grew up reading the NME obsessively for all the great writing it had. Plenty from that generation (now feeling sadly disenfranchised and neglected in the Cowell era) would love to read a good magazine with in-depth articles and great writing (Q started well in that sense before losing its drive). Unlike in the US, where Rolling Stone adapted and continued to speak to a broad community of music fans, the UK seemed to give up on literate music journalism circa 1990. But that generation still loves talking about music - music that really mattered to them - and is still fascinated in its history and its greatest characters, and they still like print media. The younger generation has little interest in such things, and little patience, so admittedly it's a time-specific audience but a potentially valuable one, too. And if such a magazine was priced more sensibly, I'm sure it would blast the others out of the water.

IMO there are a few reasons for the industry decline.

- Quality of songs put out by the majors.
The quality steadily declined but the majors were happy as they thought they could sell any old shit. Real songwriters weren’t required anymore as anyone, artists, management etc. thought they could write the songs. Check out some of the credits from the late nineties and naughties.

- Quality of acts put out by the majors.
No real A&R, just keeping it in the family a lot of the time. No development either.

- Manufactured bands/artists.
For some reason, the public were OK with it until they saw it happening and were able to get involved themselves. There’s something strange about involving the public in that they tend to turn on “their chosen” artists straight after the show finishes.

- Market research.
As above, the public are choosing what they want but they don’t know what they want. Would they have asked for Jimi Hendrix, Queen, The Prodigy? No, they were inconceivable.

Well JK Adele has just sold 22 million copies of her 2nd album on the strength of songs and real talent, and everyone from Martin Mills to Richard Russell to Jonathan Dickens basically telling Sony to shove it up their ass "We are doing it our way". So massive exposure is still possible following an independent mindset.

The problem is that the media will call Adele a "Superstar" which she is...and then turn around and call a talentless Justin Beiber a "Superstar" which is quite fucked up when what he is is the Bobby Sherman or Shaun Cassidy of 2012 with Usher's and LA Reid's money as the coal of that locomotive using today's technology. Technology is driving that act, not great songs or talent.


As far as magazines RS and Billboard have been irrelevant for at least a decade, and as far as I'm concerned the charts are truly all but meaningless today.

The general public is ignorant and can be saturation marketed to. Hence the rise of realty television all but consuming all commercial programming.

The public that allows reality TV and the celebutoid journo culture to flourish has a serious effect on what music is consumed, although every now and then an act like Adele blows that out of the water.

Spot on GG except, if I'd been producing Justin, who I think has loads of talent, he'd be a real musical superstar. He was tipped on here ages ago before anyone ever heard of him (except You Tubers)- I avoided listening as I loathe unbroken voices, but it's a shame he's been given third rate manufactured crap and forced into dreadful "duets" with "cred" rappers. The boy deserves better. That's what I call child abuse.

@GG Adele on an indie label is a one in a blue moon sort of thing as far as the old model system is concerned.
Credit to them for getting all that exposure but sadly that is a serious exception.

@JK & GG Can you be pleased? Bieber is still selling and appeals to the kids, yet you find fault. It is what it
is and Bieber is a superstar. For heaven's sake JK you are really being crass by calling this child abuse.

The new model will level the playing field in ways that none of you old schoolers will believe. As soon as you
embrace the new model you will find that artists will flourish, novelty acts will flourish, everyone will flourish.
Of course there will be winners and losers but there will be NO guesswork with music and it won't need a ridiculous
budget to promote. There are a lot of things driving the new model. Technology is the most important factor.
It is technology that brought the new model into existence. Let's not be silly here, the charts are still important.

No, the charts are totally unimportant except for the Xmas No1 because it gets attention from media. The charts always WERE unimportant except in the UK where TV and radio picked them up (as a way of providing cheap/free programming information) - a brilliant idea which allowed British music to dominate the world for several decades.

I'm happy for Bieber to sell; just sad the music is not better. Even manufactured groups and artistes CAN be great (as Don Kirshner proved with the early Monkees thanks to Neil Diamond and John Stewart).

I bet you Justin would be far, far happier making the music HE loves to make - after training, tuition, learning, rehearsing. And I bet he'll be as screwed up as Michael Jackson was by the time he's 30.

The Word was an excellent magazine, supplemented by a great website (dominated by a rabid community of bloggers), tremendous podcasts, and even (fairly) regular gigs.

Unfortunately (and I say this as a fan and subscriber), it found itself painted into a corner that only appealed to white, male, middle-aged, music maniacs, which is fine in itself, but it had virtually no crossover appeal.

The Word's demise isn't about "the new model", it's simply about not reaching a level where the advertisers will pay the kinds of fees needed to maintain the costs of putting together a high-quality magazine each month.

Circulation was around 25,000 before it withdrew from ABC a while back (presumably it sunk in the meantime), but Mojo still sells almost 90,000 a month, and if anything, is growing its readership. People still like to read long, in-depth articles (which are a pain online) and see great photographs (ditto), and though I won't go so far as to say magazines will be around forever, they're not going anywhere just yet...

The Charts are exactly what they are today as they were 30 years ago. A ranking of what tracks/songs that the public are purchasing in a 7 day period. Nothing more, nothing less. I would ague that they are more accurate today because the ability to "hype" (as in falsify the sales data) is less possible. (You can still influence what people buy, but that's always been the case!)

re the Charts:......Well Dixie, last year it took the lowest number of sales for an album to go in at Billboard number 1, and I believe it was in the 50,000 range, which is quite poor, so the charts are nowhere near the same as far as its impact on a career or its meaning in 2012.

Katy Perry having 4 or 5 number 1's is not even remotely the same thing as the Beatles doing it in 1964.

The celebutoid hype on Perry when that happened made me sick, pulling the wool over the eyes of an ignorant sheep public that were lapping it up...... People in the music business should understand its not the same thing. I was standing on the side of the stage at the Grammy Noms event last year which was on national television in the States, and I could hear Perry sing acoustically (unlike everyone watching on TV). She couldn't sing a note.

I've said all of this before