When I was a wee nipper I wanted to be a rock critic instead of a rock performer because my heroes all wrote for New Musical Express: Julie Burchill, Charles Shaar Murray, Mick Farren, Nick Kent -these were the guys I wanted to emulate.
And I wasn’t alone, New Musical express averaged 300, 000 copies a week sold IN THE UK!! Yeah, there were big and I was a huge huge. I consider the NME a bigger influence on my life than, well, than just about anything. Certainly bigger than punk and punk was huge.
That was 1977,
In 2014, the NME sells an average of 14K copies a week.
According to Gigwise, “Other titles to suffer include Q magazine whose sales fell 21.8% to 46,096, but with digital rose to 48,353. Elsewhere, Mojo saw a dip of 10.9%, Uncut 12.1% and Kerrang sales have dropped 12.2% to 33,024.
Speaking to The Guardian on behalf of NME, IPC publishing director Jo Smalley said that their total reach across all platforms was now 3.6 million – “bigger than it has ever been”, with traffic on their website growing by 85%.”
Perhaps, but web is not sales and any way, NME, or really any publication, is not the huge taste arbitrator it once was, everybody is Pitchfork and their icy synths. It is sad but we are 20 years past the golden age of rock writing, it is over man.
