Music magazine NME returns to paper

Legendary music magazine NME (New Musical Express) is relaunching its print edition and preparing to apply a new sales model. Tells Igor Gavrilov.

Founded in England in 1952, the NME was published as a weekly newspaper in its early decades. Already in the 14th issue, the publishers posted a list of the 12 most popular songs in the UK. The country received the same tool for measuring the popularity of hits as the Billboard that already existed for America at that time. In the 1960s, at the height of the Beatles and Rolling Stones boom, New Musical Express had a circulation of over 300,000. In the same period, the magazine began to organize concerts of the leaders of the reader’s sympathy, which were willingly broadcast by British television. In the 1970s, surviving a decline in demand in the face of competition from other music media, NME focused on the underground and became the mouthpiece of the rising punk bands. Later, with the same dedication, the publication heralded the arrival of post-punk, hip-hop and grunge. The characteristic features of the NME were the complete freedom of authors who did not recognize authorities, and the photo of the “new star” on the front page. Having transformed into a magazine, NME has remained the main trendsetter in the music press of the Old World. If a musician appeared on the cover of NME, one could not worry about his career.

In the mid-2010s, NME took a bold step and switched to free distribution. This was due both to a decline in sales caused by the move of music media to the Internet, and to competition from existing free paper media. Rihanna appeared on the cover of the first free issue. In its new capacity, the paper magazine existed for three years, after which the NME brand continued to exist as a website. And it was recently announced that this summer the publication will return to the print media market in the form of a bimonthly magazine.

The decision to revive the paper version was inspired by the growth in sales of vinyl discs and compact cassettes. The head of NME Networks, Holly Bishop, believes that a limited-edition magazine could be the subject of the same hype as, for example, sneakers or perfume. On the NME website, her boss Meng Roo Quoc, owner of Singapore-based Caldecott Music Group, which owns the brand, promises that the updated magazine will appeal to a global audience and take them on an exciting journey through the worlds of music, film, television and gaming.

The magazine is not going to forget about the support of new artists. 18-year-old rapper d4vd is on the cover of the first NME issue since the restart. The publication describes him as an innovator, as he completely recorded his debut EP in his phone. d4vd’s main hit “Romantic Homicide” went viral on TikTok – without this, the worldwide popularity of the song is impossible today. D4vd coexists with Billie Eilish and Holly Humberstone in the Darkroom Records label catalog, so it is difficult to attribute it to the underground. And d4vd is by no means a pioneer in recording an album on a phone, as many have done. But in the new life, NME remains true to its principles: the cover artist cannot but be “the most progressive, relevant and promising.”

In the first paragraph of the text about the hero of the cover, it is said that d4vd was going to record new songs using a Neumann microphone, but it turned out that he feels much more comfortable in the BandLab application than in an expensive studio. At the same time, software for musicians, released under the BandLab brand, is produced by Caldecott Music Group.

When the NME went free, critic Simon Reynolds wrote in The Pitchfork Review: “Remember (if you lived then) when you had to wait a whole week for a magazine to come out to hear about new music … Now everything has become so instantaneous that such a feeling is rarely experienced. You are always in information absorption mode – always online. And this sometimes kills not only that very feeling of agonizing expectation, but also the very appetite for such information.

How keen will be the appetite for information about entertainment that comes out on paper every other month? Is it worth comparing this feeling with the passion of a vinyl collector or a person who learned about the existence of audio cassettes in 2023? Before the online media revolution ended most of the paper magazines, the art of magazine printing itself reached incredible heights. Take the issue of Wallpaper dedicated to Zaha Hadid, for example, each page of which was part of an architectural project, for which it was cut in a special way. Or the art magazine TAR, whose title was printed on the cover by hand in thick oil paint. This kind of art objects can really have an independent value and live for a long time regardless of the informational events collected under the cover.

The revamped NME could be commercially successful if each number becomes a coveted item to own, like a coveted limited edition record. One can imagine exclusive vinyl singles or artist autographed pages included in the issue.

But the further you read the story of d4vd in NME, the more it becomes like a sales pitch for a music production app. In England, the home of NME, the main distribution channel will be the Dawsons chain of musical instrument and equipment stores. Thus, the texts, united under the legendary acronym, will become something like advertising booklets for Caldecott Music Group, with its interests in recording technology and instrument production. “With our new format, we fundamentally distance ourselves from the newsstand,” says Holly Bishop. It turns out that the media, which covered and sometimes even initiated the musical revolutions of the last 70 years, will become part of marketing without pretensions to a journalistic challenge.