Has The NME Got Good?

Next week its Destiny's Child - another useless front cover.

Destiny's Child - and the NYC issue for that matter - pretty much confirm my original qn, i.e. the NME is on the right track currently. Themed issues = good. Putting the people making exciting pop records on the cover = good. The records Destiny's Child are making at the moment are terrific - there shouldn't even be a question about them being on the NME front cover.

We didn't know where to put ourselves.

However the NME should at least have a 1 page feature of Ulver.

and a significant album review - in the old MM circa late 80s- a band released a significant and exceptional album then they would be rewarded with a large review (column inches) regardless of size profile.

I will be surprised if the NME review the Ulver album - as the NME are ignorant bastards when it comes to non US/British bands.

For the curious Ulver - Perdition City

Ulver - Perdition City - is released April 23th on Jester Records through Shellshock/Pinnancle in the UK.

There are also a number of important points on the NME current music coverage - that I want to expand on. Later.

x0x0

In what way are Travis the biggest band in Britain? Hear'say? Westlife? Destiny's Child? Atomic Kitten? How many number ones have Travis had? Their definition of "band" seems to still be confined to a) Not manufactured (Whatever that means) b) Play guitars (and only guitars - none of this electronic nonsense) c) Male. It's the equivalent of Fruit and Veg Magazine putting Greengrocer Of The Year on the cover and describing them as "THE GREATEST PERSON WHO EVER LIVED", provided by "person" they mean "greengrocer".

But to get back to the subject...I think NME has changed for the better this year, but basically there just isn't enough to read in it that's interesting.

Maybe it's trying to be all things to all people, when it will always be synonymous with indie/leftfield music. Personally I don't mind reading about Destiny's Child or Outkast as long as it's interesting. But people are going to read Mix Mag, Hip Hop Connection whatever, if they are really into the dance, hip-hop or R'n'B scenes.

What was it that Matt from Sarah Records once said..."if you're a fan of jangley guitars then you're narrow minded. If you're a hip-hop fan then you are a specialist." or something like that.

to be heavily into hip-hop, understand the push/pull it enacts, you can't be fascistic about it, which is why the holier than thou attitude taken on by much of the uk hip-hop underground (trying to put pop in a cage where it can be looked at but not touched) - and, i suppose, that of our transatlantic counterparts as well - irks so much.

NME freelancers are being told to sign these horrible new agreements. Say, for example, someone gets to do a feature with Destiny's Child. The writer turns in a pretty good interview but has some material left over. The LA Weekly or someone asks for that writer to file a piece on same. Under the terms of the NME's new agreement, they wouldn't be able to because the NME would own, forever, the TAPE of the interview and any other out-takes.

Any freelance who doesn't sign does not get any more work from the paper/website. They are paid something like 15p a word for work they do, which is a lot less than you can get for selling interviews to the American market or a British newspaper, and they have none of the benefits of being on staff, usually no retainer even. It's patently unfair to ask those without job security to agree to such terms, and 20 writers are looking into a potential case against IPC for restraint of trade/intellectual property rights etc. If you want to know more, Tom, ask Angus Batey to fill you in. I think he was the one who went to the Guardian in the first place.

The best part of the story DG's quoting? 'Mr Sutherland was unavailable for comment.' Now there's a great big fuckin' first!

Source Media Guardian Feb 2001

I would think that if the NME dropped below 50,000 a week then questions would be asked about its future.

Sounds closed at around around 39,000 sales in 1991, Melody Maker closed at 32,500 sales in Dec 2000.

However much I dislike NME's music direction in 2001 To lose 20,000 sales from Feb 2001 to the end of the year, is unlikely.

When the Guardian went online it sent around a fait accompli letter to anyone submitting freelance work that said The Guardian owned the reprint rights on each piece submitted; notification of this fact equalled an expectation of compliance. A lot of people stopped dealing with them afterward because the freelance rate did not rise one jot. What's going on at the NME is about a million times worse, and might be one reason the thing appears to be written by monkeys and Muppets these days - good writers often have annoying characteristics like principles and the tendency to disagree with the logic of their 'superiors' at work.

I don't think the NME will go down the pan because the site gets a gazillion hits every week. Brand manager is the perfect job for an Oxbridge, sexist skinhead Muppet like Sutherland, the job can do itself.

Do the freelancers laugh at the Travis, Stereophonics, The Strokes and Linkin Park front covers ..like the rest of us?

Who decides on the NME front covers Sutherland or Knowles or 16 year old work experience kids on a focus market research panel? I want to identify blame.

Also I noticed that Mojo are seeking a new editor at the mo Advert

But did you see the piece Keith Cameron wrote on Travis for the Guardian Weekend? I found it frighteningly ambivalent, as though he was just *describing* the situation where they have got so big, and he just didn't seem motivated to speak out against it. Maybe age has hit him where it hurts, but his pro-Oasis rhetoric wasn't what I wanted to read from the NME *at all* in 1995.

Mark Sutherland - a pompey fan - well that is suprising.

Definitely the editor, after feedback in editorial meetings, with pressure from upstairs. Yes, the freelancers do often laugh themselves sick at the choices made by the above. I actually don't think they're focus groupies at the NME (and anyway, no focus group I've ever been privy to asks for specifics about content, more general areas or should the spine be book-bound rather than stapled, yada yada). That's Emap's department: a pal of mine who once edited one of their music mags was rung on Boxing Day by the big cheese to be told if his cover choice didn't pan out, heads would roll.

Also, access is controlled by PR's who grant exclusives based on the promise of A Cover ('my client will not get out of bed for less than 5000 words') and how arsey the paper's tone has been to the other artists they represent. NME will generally be in the same queue for coverage as Mixmag, The Face, Q, Mojo. Dazed and Confused. i-D and Sleazenation choose who to cover based on sneakier means; getting early access to photographs because one of their people, say Wolfgang Tillmans or Juergen Teller or Corinne Day, has done a shoot (photographers have much, much better phone books than most editors). If style mags have the photos, then they have a powerful bargaining tool with the PRs who represent the artiste. No PR company would get angry at a 'cool' photographer for this kind of scoop, as they lend the artiste cred and in many cases get commissions from the record company direct.

Hate to be all insider/media ho' about this, but I think it's my duty, after 10 years' experience of these matters, to put that to use demystifying the media's methods.

That was the eye-opening thing inside books like _Powder_ - not the "Oh my god, rock stars are perverted, and singer/songwriters are ego-ridden gits" bit of it, but the insider (manager) information on how things like "cover articles" get handed out.

Then again, I suppose knowing too much can really leave a distaste in the mouth. If someone chose to do a Popstars style expose on how even the "indie"s are completely mechanised, I think I would move to Alaska with ProTools and never leave the house again.

BTW my first job in London was, you guessed it, NME freelancer. I ran away to join the Riot Grrrls, as any sensible female would.

Anjali

I would be interested in hearing your experiences of Riot Grrl, and whether you think it and its daughters have accomplished anything, but that's probably another thread.

Funny thing about "The Press" is... most musicians are unable to separate "The Press" (a faceless, corporate entity controlled by Brand Directors in IPC Towers) from the individual, badly paid, often cynical freelancers that are sent to review and/or interview them. Remember that musicians have been as badly burned by the Suits Upstairs as the freelancers have been, they just don't know it. (And vice versa)

ht tp://news.independent.co.uk/uk/media/story.jsp?story=80594

It's all games.

Anyone got anything on David Lister? Name = familiar. Every time I read that Zappa quote (always quoted by eeevil sold-out pea- brains like Simon Hoggart) I find I despise FZ more.

http://www.mediaguardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/ 0,7495,513257,00.html

Circulation is dropping, but the website is increasing... so why the heck don't they take advantage of the nature of the internet to increase it even further beyond just a print version of the reviews, and a live news feed? Oh, I'm going to start ranting again, see remarks on the "what do you want from the press" thread.

he's not, he's pete simons :)

this is either forgetfulness on viv's part or the long-stewed beef of some ancient feud

Grauniad?

i blame Alba

for some reason the swells phrase which sticks with me comes from a mid-90s interview where he takes issue with some feeble waif of a frontman (possibly rick witter) and asks if he'd not prefer to be stalking the stage 'encased in 250lbs of rock-hard raw beef'

just realised that i have academic access to rock's back pages and thus i can confirm that swells did indeed use that exact phrase in conversation with rick witter in an article published on 9 may 1998, meaning it's been rattling around my brain for almost exactly 20 years :(

"When I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais engraved on my heart" — Queen Mary

^^it's like this but world-historical

also we have to open your head

i can't remember this morning's commute but i can remember something an nme hack yelled at the singer from shed seven three decades ago

i feel like my head is already open tbh

irl lolled at rock's back pages revelation

A classic from the the Steve Sutherland era

Oof. Here's the original NME review of Baduizm. Yikes. pic.twitter.com/RXCXw6LSwY

— Caspar Salmon (@CasparSalmon) July 5, 2018

Music magazine NME's switch to all digital format led to a 72% collapse in reader engagement:
https://www.mediaite.com/print/heres-what-magazines-lose-when-they-go-digital-only/

Online readers of NME only spend an average of about three minutes a month with the publication, per the study, while print readers spent an average of about a half-hour a week with the magazine.

[...]

NME was founded in 1952. The publication was acquired earlier this year by the Singapore-based company BandLab Technologies and was previously owned by Time Inc., which made the decision to end the print product.

Well, there it isn't.

Longtime NME media editor and features writer Gavin Martin has died at the age of 60.