the demise of music magazines

eoinf

has anyone else noticed how easy NME latch onto mediocre band and promote them to death (i.e kaiser chiefs ,babyshambles, franz ferdinand last year). has the NME become a glorified smash hits.
Is there a credible music magazine out there?

DerekD Goldfish

has the NME become a glorified smash hits.

It has been for ages

Is there a credible music magazine out there?

Foggy Notions is the best of a bad bunch

muzzle

think it started around the time of the strokes/white stripes explosion. any band who came after these, with 4 chords, long hair and a 'the' in their name was hailed as ' the greatest band since, well...the strokes'.

Melody Maker used to have something interesting to say, as did NME but lately its just sh1te.

eoinf wrote:

has anyone else noticed how easy NME latch onto mediocre band and promote them to death (i.e kaiser chiefs ,babyshambles, franz ferdinand last year). has the NME become a glorified smash hits.
Is there a credible music magazine out there?

honru

Someone who feels strongly about NME;

www.boycottthenme.com

super_furry

Select used to be great back in the mid-90s, but since they went out of business, I haven't bothered. NME seems to be aimed at young teenagers, Q is still desperately trying to justify pop music to a middle aged crowd while Mojo still thinks music stopped being made in 1978.

Milkman Dan

music magazines used to be independent publications of journalism which shared the 'rock n roll" spirit, home to some of the best writing and the best new writers. now they are tools of the record companys and in thrall to their advertisers.

NME is crying wolf about every new band at an alarming rate, and unfortunately, while the albums sell, they can't sustain the hype. as well as always being the first to promote a band, they are often the first to decide that they're finished.

Hotpress is a shameless freesheet-with-articles load of rubbish, the only music magazine to offer the front cover for sale. they actually send out a massive amount of copies every fortnight to their advertisers and people who work in the industry.

Q magazine is basically a catalogue of bland major label artists.

rolling stone can have some good articles, but sometimes it feels pompous and self righteous to a fault.

Robbo

In the last couple of years Q has become ridiculous with constant lists in place of actual articles. Aside from being insipid, they're a lazy and cheap alternative to actual journalism.

The NME has had a long history of promoting awful bands du jour, well before The Strokes. I'm only a young fella but fawning over stuff like Gay Dad and Menswear is unforgivable. I'm sure someone older could list stuff preceeding that.

Hotpress is hilariously bad. I actually buy it on a regular basis for sheer comedic value.

TBH, I find the best stuff these days in various different places like the Guardian Friday Review, the Observer music monthly and on the web (there's an excellent article in the New York Times of late about the forever delayed new Guns n Roses album).

Jonny Arson

I personally feel the NME gets far to much stick. I'm an occasional reader. I've been buying it on a basis of once every 2-3 weeks.

I do agree that NME does go OTT in promoting certain bands however I feel that that sometimes alot of the 'hype' NME pours on bands is justified. OK it cannot be disputed that NME over the past 12 months has been The Libertines weekly. Great if your a Libs fan like me, hell if your not but I'm an open minded music fan and do not buy any album of any band who NME hypes to death. I've only really started reading NME over the past 12 months so I can't say what the hype over bands like The Strokes is like but the 'hype the NME has put on bands like Babyshambles, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs I feel is justified. I like these bands and buy their albums because I ove their music simple. I not going to deny that NME has a huge influence over people's music tastes but at the end of the day I feel alot of this 'hype' is justified.

I will say that the NME is a little bit of an indie Smash Hits in terms of its interviews. The interviews are rarely cutting edge IMO. The one thing I find appaling about NME is its album reviews ... they're shockingly poor.

I do like NME but I do feel it could do with a bit more maturity and open mindedness.

Oh I can hear the unsavoury replies coming in now!

eoinf

Zane from MTV2 wrote:

. I not going to deny that NME has a huge influence over people's music tastes

surely it should be the music that influences peoples musical tastes not some rag of a magazine

Jonny Arson

eoinf wrote:

surely it should be the music that influences peoples musical tastes not some rag of a magazine

I know it should but alot of people who read NME will only listen to the stuff they say to listen to - FACT

You could say that applies to all music genres. Sadly too many people listen to certain types of music in order to fit into a trend. Too many people are either indie or metal and don't branch out a enough.

loyatemu

I read the NME throughout the 90s and they have been overhyping bands and scenes since long before then (remember New-wave-of-new-wave and Romo? - no of course you don't)

sometimes they get it right and a lot of the time they get it wrong - I used to read it for the quality of the writing. I've heard its now ****e but music magazines are a bit of a pointless expense these days if you have access to the net.

Hot Press is a parochial, sanctimonious piece of crap and alway has been - their current smug ads featuring pictures of the writers are typical of their bigheaded-fish in a small pond mentality.

comet

I agree with everyone that the music magazine industry is in a seriously bad state. I often walk into the newsagent wanting to buy a music magazine but whats on offer is just so bad that I leave empty handed. Not to mention the price i was recently looking at Uncut or Mojo with a free cd on the cover and it was price at €7.50 or something craxy like that. I wouldn't even call Hot Press a music magazine. I read nme.com on a daily basis and despite the head-wrecking adds that take over the screen its good for the latest news.

John

NME is terrible. It always has been. I stupidly bought the Goth special edition to read up all the old Cure and Nick Cave interviews and lo and behold, the "journalism" has always been aimed at the lowest common denominator.

Foggy Notions is a good magazine but doesn't seem to come out fast enough, by the time they interview an artist they have finished touring and have started work on their next album.

The Wire is the only magazine I read now but it's no good if you like anything that's remotely popular. It is a very pretentious magazine but it's still the best of a bad lot because although the journalists are opinionated, very often the entire staff has a completely different opinion on everything. Plus it does interesting interviews, asking proper questions and it does great features (the Invisible Jukebox feature is very interesting, they sit an artist down and play tracks without telling them what it's going to be and interview them around that).

Milkman Dan

foggy notions is finished now too, as far as i know.

smackbunnybaby

NME have an excellent website

NME Website

Well worth a read - honestly please do!!

MrJoeSoap

[snigger] Kerrang! [/snigger]

Tusky

MrJoeSoap wrote:

[snigger] Kerrang! [/snigger]

joins in snigger.

NME is absolute trash, wouldnt wipe my bum with it.

sleepwalker

whats the story with the hot press ?

the cover seems to be the best part of the entire magazine theres nothing but alot of pseudo left wing bull**** inside it

comet

smackbunnybaby wrote:

NME have an excellent website

NME Website

Well worth a read - honestly please do!!

lol - very good!

Karl Hungus

Terrorizer is the only music mag I read, because as I see it, it's the only magazine that can actually make a claim to journalism. It's devoid of the turgid 'top 10' lists, bar the yearly readers poll, and aside from it being a majorly Metal mag, it definetly tries to expand the horizons of its readership, doing some great features on music outside of metal (including a great report on some electronic music, with groups like Venitian Snares) and some excellent, huge features on different genres of music, that traced how the genres and styles started and evolved over the years, like industrial, punk, progressive, thrash and suchlike all had dedicated features on them, that consisted of a number of very in-depth articles.

Definetly a very intelligent peice of journalism, and an very refreshing read, consider they'd often mention the likes of Yes, Jethro Tull, King Crimson and Genesis alongside the likes of Emperor, Opeth and Arcturus, to mention but a few.

John

Karl Hungus wrote:

Terrorizer is the only music mag I read, because as I see it, it's the only magazine that can actually make a claim to journalism.

Forgot about Terrorizer. Wouldn't normally buy it because buying more music magazines = buying less cd's but I'd definitely give it a read in the library (Tower).

Blisterman

I like Blender, good interviews and features, and covers all genres.

magpie

Mojo is quite good if you like historical pieces about old bands, as well as reviews of all the new releases.

NME has always been a rag. Burn it now. As for Hot Press, between claiming the Smiths and Oasis as 'Irish' bands, and all the nonsense about Northern Ireland and being a Lezzer in Dublin there's no room for proper journalism. Burn it. Foggy Notions looks nice, but all the articles are about obscure Norwegian Indie bands on the 'toadwarbler' label from Helsinki. As a mate of mine said about the contributors "get a girlfriend lads" . I'm sorry Leagues (if that is your real name), but burn it.

ThatBloke

Uncut is the best around by far in my opinion. I rarely buy magazines anymore though. T'internet has more than enough sites to fulfill my need for articles that reaffirm my opinions

Wertz

Mixmag tbh

I know not everyone is into the dance/club scene but they do good journalism and cover non-dance groups/bands.
Their mix CDs are better than most all the sh*te you'll find in the shops too...

blinkenlight

i used to read uncut a lot but they are obsessed with dad-rock. If you look through their back-issues you see the same old faces on every cover and as good as those groups are i just got tired of reading about them. That said, the writing in it is good and their reviews are usually ok - i get mojo now and it's grand too but i've only read a few issues. http://www.pitchforkmedia.com worth a look online.


hurray my first post...

monument

Word, is quite good, there is a demo edition online here. But because I rarely see Word in newsagents anywhere but the UK, the only music mag I usually read is the OMM with the Observer newspaper once a month.

ThatBloke

Metacritic is a good online music review source, it adds up the socres of all reviews and gives an average.

quando

Anyone ever read Uncut? Usually I'd get Q but it seems to have gone all bland recently,they've changed the design layout and added a few new features like web download charts etc which is great but the rest has fallen well below the mark.

Picked up Uncut for a change and it's pretty decent, don't know what it's track record is like though, only been reading it a while....

I did read Uncut before. They had a cd with sample tracks from the albums thy reviewed, which is why I bought it. They've stopped doing that now and instead have these "themed" albums instead. I stopped buying it then.