NME at the gate

From New Coke to Blockbuster’s return as a streaming service, brand reboots don’t always work out, but when a relaunch does, it’s often simply down to luck. 

For example, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the vinyl revival began, but once it was established that 12-inch records were cool again, an intersection occurred between middle-aged dads rediscovering album collections stashed in lofts and hipster teens encountering the medium for the first time. Vinyl’s new appeal, especially amongst its youngest consumers, had less to do with the music than ‘collectability’. As heartening as it was to see teens buying Rumours, London Calling or The Dark Side Of The Moon via £30 reissues bought from the few HMV stores that remain, it was their Instagram appeal and opportunities to post iconic sleeves on ubiquitous ‘Now Playing’ plinths.

Consider, then, the associated revival of the NME. I say “revival” but in truth the venerable organ, launched in 1952, never went away. It just ceased, in 2018, to be printed. But as of yesterday the once august weekly newspaper has returned in physical form, relaunched by the brand’s latest owners as a bi-monthly, limited edition magazine, and openly inspired by the resurgence of vinyl and even cassettes.

That’s the marketing pitch, but the NME’s print relaunch isn’t without a modern twist: you won’t be buying it from a newsagent, at least not straight away. NME Networks - part of the Caldecott Music Group (which also publishes Uncut) - will only be producing the new NME in very limited quantities, making them available through the Dawsons chain, which it owns. It’s a deliberate ploy to create exclusivity in much the same way as Nike creates hype (and the occasional riot) with “drops” of limited edition trainers. 

Thus last night at exactly 7.52pm (the original NME was launched in 1952…) those sitting in one of those dreaded online waiting rooms so hated by Taylor Swift fans were given their chance to get their hands on the new NME. Naturally, it sold out straight away.

No details have been given on the size of this NME’s print run, but with a £10 cover price and a promise of a thick, glossy, coffee table-friendly Vogue-like design, presumably they’ve done their homework on how to cover costs. What those of us unsuccessful in getting hold of a copy can’t yet gauge is whether it is any good. Moreover, how this NME stacks up to the NME’s 71-year-legacy.  

Having begun in March 1952 following the purchase, for the princely sum of £1000, of The Accordion Times and Musical Express by music promoter Maurice Kinn, the New Musical Express quickly established itself as the UK’s primary journal of record for contemporary music. Later that year it created the first British singles chart (copying the American magazine Billboard) with Al Martino’s Here In My Heart becoming the first ever British Number 1. 

By the 1960s the NME was selling 300,000 copies a week as the Beat Boom took off, with The Beatles, Rolling Stones and their ilk regularly featured on the cover and at the annual televised NME Poll Winners’ Concert, the Brit Awards of its day. 

In the ’70s the NME took on more of an underground approach to its journalism, with seminal writers like Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray joining the staff, with the magazine championing the broadening post-Beatles pop and rock revolution. With punk came further evolution, with cover features on the Sex Pistols and The Clash, and Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill making their names as a new generation of ‘angry young writers’, to use the hackneyed description. Many will consider this the start of a golden age for the NME and music journalism - as carefree and opinionated as punk itself.

The NME wasn’t alone: along with its closest (and, sometimes, bitterest) rival Melody Maker, plus the more heavy rock-orientated Sounds, they vied for the pocket money of spotty youths up and down the country. In 1978 another challenger appeared, Smash Hits, beginning as a poster magazine (and created by ex-NME editor Nick Logan), which would eventually go on to sell a staggering four million copies a fortnight. Around this time a new editor, Neil Spencer was promoted, overseeing a redesign of the NME and shifting the broadsheet further towards post-punk and New Wave, bringing in new blood like Danny Baker (a former NME receptionist and writer for the punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue), along with the spiky likes of Paul Morley and Ian Penman.

As I began to develop my own interest in music at the start of the 1980s, the NME broadened further, reflecting wider youth interests in the Thatcher era, taking on a notably left-leaning complexion in the process. This chimed with the politics of many of the musicians it covered who, themselves, were capturing the dystopian gloom of young life in Britain in the first half of the decade, a period signified by inner city rioting, CND marches and a decidedly socialist strand to pop. Which, thinking about it now, makes my own debut in the NME more incongruous.

In 1984, my first year of Sixth Form, I decided that my future lay in music journalism. The NME, Melody Maker and, particularly, Smash Hits, had become bibles to me. At the same time, Gary Crowley’s evening show on Capital Radio was essential listening. Deciding that if my ambitions were to be taken seriously I’d need a portfolio of writing samples that weren’t solely made up of reports for the school magazine, I brazenly asked Gary for an interview. Incredibly, he agreed and I went up to the old Capital studios on London’s Euston Road one Tuesday evening. After the interview he asked if I was serious about becoming a music hack, to which I said yes, prompting him to suggest getting in touch with one of his pals at the NME, which I did. 

And so, in early January 1985, aged 17, I went to see the NME’s then live reviews editor: “Er…are you going to see anyone in the coming weeks?” he asked. All I could think of was that I tickets for Phil Collins at the Royal Albert Hall a few weeks later. “OK, do a couple of hundred words on that,” he asked. As the clipping below attests, I managed to get possibly the first Phil Collins live review published in punk’s once-angriest of papers. And possibly the last.

That alone, though, was enough to get me in. The following year, after my A-levels, I got an actual staff job with a new magazine, who liked the cut of my jib. I had the NME to thank for that. Although I only did a handful of things for the NME (I was, supposedly, also trying to get through Sixth Form at the time), it was the start I needed. However, the mid-’80s were a perilous time for the paper. Smash Hits (whom I later did work for) was cannibalising the NME’s pop-minded readership, while the paper itself was struggling to find its editorial identity. Traditionalists on the staff wanted it to continue driving a rock agenda, while more progressive voices championed alternative genres, like hip-hop, all while the magazine continued evolving beyond just music magazine to become a broader cultural barometer.

Music didn’t leave its core, however. In the ’90s, Britpop provided a totemic platform not seen since the ’60s (reaching its zenith with the landmark Blur-vs-Oasis cover in August 1995 marking the simultaneous release of the former’s Country House and the latter’s Roll With It). Music was in rude health again, at least from an editorial perspective, leading to copious coverage in the NME of Madchester and the decade’s mainstreaming of Indie, along with the emergence of American grunge. Into the mix came a further influx to the writing corps, with Steve Lamacq, Stuart Maconie, Mary Anne Hobbs and Andrew Collins joining the roster and giving the paper a new sense of zeitgeist vibrancy.

With the new Millennium came further change, and not all good, either. In 2000 publisher IPC folded Melody Maker into the NME in what many saw as the first death throe of the printed music weekly. Not that there wasn’t plenty for the medium to cover, with new British bands like Kaiser Chiefs, Libertines and, later, Arctic Monkeys. The march of time, though, continued to prove an impossible foe, and by 2014 the NME’s weekly circulation had fallen to 15,000. This prompted the now Time Inc.-owned title to be relaunched as a free magazine in an attempt to boost readership and the advertising the comes with it. The experiment, if it can be called that, lasted just three years before the NME became a digital-only site. While that retained the old paper’s musical news focus, it lacked the journalistic essence that had built its reputation in the heyday of Kent, Shaar Murray, Burchill, Parsons and later, Dannys Baker and Kelly, and the Britpop scribes.

Holly Bishop
Picture: NME Networks

It’s unlikely that their editorial spirit will be revived under the new print venture, so the question is, how will it be relevant? “Although the written word will always play a part in our journalism,” NME Networks chief operating and commercial officer Holly Bishop told the trade magazine UK Press Gazette, “it’s no longer front and centre and it’s naïve to think any different”. 

The 2023 version of the NME will have to appeal to Gen Z, an audience more attuned to consuming content via social media. New music, Bishop maintains, will still be paramount. “An artist can have a meteoric rise on a single track on TikTok, for example. But is there longevity there? It remains to be seen. And actually, what we do know is an artist making music that’s authentic to them, that is good music. It will find a way through, particularly when brands like ours are actively seeking it.”

“NME obviously boasts an incredible print legacy,” Bishop told UKPG. “It’s one of the most recognised titles on Earth in print. We’ve had the biggest icons across pop culture appear on our cover.” But, she adds, the exercise is not without its challenges - “not just in terms of audience engagement, but also production; rising costs, particularly in this economic climate.”

“We aren’t looking to [create] hundreds of thousands of readers out of this print product,” Bishop added. “We know that our trajectory remains firmly rooted in being a digitally-led brand and we are successful in that space. NME.com has got more users than ever before and we obviously can monetise those in the traditional ways with advertising and partnerships.” For that, she says, they’re taking “an atypical, unconventional approach to distribution too. We’re not printing masses of copies because we really believe in the inherent value of scarcity.”

If all this sounds like marketingspeak, and a world away from the 1977-spirit-of-punk NME, it’s because the title is as much a brand these days as a single, identifiable newspaper. NME.com continues to attract some 17 million visitors each month, covering the broad scope of genres as well as television, film, games and other branches of pop culture. Its proprietors have even launched editions in Australia and Asia. The new magazine, however, will be global, “curating the very best of NME,” according to Bishop, “championing emerging artists and bands, and serving as the definitive voice in pop culture”.

That will commence with a first edition featuring on its cover 18-year-old self-taught American singer-songwriter d4vd (David Burke), first profiled by the NME online last September as the “multi-genre visionary turning TikTok attention into major chart success”. It’s a bold opening statement from the latest evolution of a magazine now in its eighth decade. In editions to come, we can expect more interviews with similar cutting edge musicians, culture features and reviews.

It remains to be seen whether the new NME will be able to recreate the urgency it once had, but you have to admire its publishers for giving it a go. The incontrovertible truth is that the world of media has become almost exclusively digital. 

Print journalism has been in terminal decline since the advent of the Internet. Last month The Guardian reported that, as a measure of the state of publishing in the UK, six of the country’s biggest selling physical-format magazines - Heat, Economist, Grazia, GQ, Vogue and Private Eye, along with newspaper supplements - are now all printed by just one single print company, Walstead. 

Between 2010 and 2022, the total number of actual magazines sold in Britain declined by 70% from around a billion copies a year to 309 million, with print publishing revenues dropping accordingly over the same period - from £1.4 billion to less than £500 million, according to Enders Analysis. Those magazines that remain in print form struggle to compete with digital distractions: compare the £6.50 you pay for Mojo, one of the few remaining stalwarts of magazine-based music journalism, with the £4.99 that Netflix’s new monthly, advertising-supported package will cost for all the entertainment distraction that offers. It’s an an apples-and-oranges comparison, of course, given that the handful of quality music magazines still in print continue to represent a tactile experience other mediums will never replicate. That, by the way, is the same experience that got me into the music press to begin with, first as a reader and then as a writer.

The NME’s conversion to digital-only five years ago was clearly part of the decline in print. The eyeballs of young consumers - those between 18 and 30 most coveted by advertisers - are simply elsewhere. British magazine websites last year accounted for less than 1% of the time this demographic spent on YouTube, 4.7% on TikTok and 7.4% on Instagram, according to The Guardian. And that is a problem for online magazine advertising. By 2025 the platforms of just Google, Meta and TikTok will earn more than £20 billion in digital advertising revenues. Compare that to, according to GroupM, the £378 million that magazines in the UK will earn by 2027.

All of which makes the decision to bring back the NME in print format even more precarious. But maybe its new owners might just succeed in appealing to the hipster strand that willingly eschews modernity (like vinyl, old-fashioned film cameras have made a return amongst the same youth demographic). This is probably the target audience for the new NME - consumers more likely to buy an expensive print magazine for its collectability, rather than the journalism inside. That, I have to say, is sad.