NME circulation does what NME circulation does

Down again, down again: print sales have now gone below 14,000 with 13995 copies finding their way into people's hands in the second half of last year.

Topping up with digital sales brings the number up to 15,384 a week, but even digital sales aren't offering much joy: 8.5% of digital readers in the first half of 2014 had vanished by the second half. Digital was never going to take the circulation back to six figures; it's starting to look like it might not keep it above five figures.

All together, NME is down another 23% on the same period in 2013.

Q is now selling 50,161; Mojo 70,693. Kerrang - once the nip-and-tuck rival to NME lost 13.7% of circulation but remains outstripping NME by nearly two-to-one.

And the gloomiest view of the figures? MediaGuardian reminds us:

But [NME] now has just half the sales of its now defunct sister title, Melody Maker, when it was closed in 2000.

*insert usual disappointing NME sales headline here*

More gloom for the NME in the latest ABC figures, as sales of the print edition slide below 15,000. MediaGuardian reports:

Music magazine New Musical Express has suffered another slump in its print sales, falling more than a quarter to fewer than 15,000 in the first half of this year.

The 62-year-old IPC Media title had an average weekly sale of 14,312 in the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures published on Thursday, down 28.5% on the same period in 2013. Including digital sales, its circulation rose to 15,830.

The figure of just over 1,500 digital sales is probably the one piece of joy - fairly pitiful, but a massive improvement on the three figures they were reporting last time round.

But something has changed. The usual positive talk from the publishers has shifted direction:

Jo Smalley, publishing director of IPC’s music brands, said NME’s total reach across all platforms was now 3.6 million, “bigger than it has ever been” despite its decline in print. In its print heyday, the magazine sold more than 300,000.

Traffic on the NME mobile website grew 85% year on year, with nearly 40% of its total online audience now reading on mobile.

Smalley said: “We are also continuing to explore how NME can further expand its international footprint. This builds upon the launch of NME.com in India and Club NME in Brazil.

“These are just a few of many examples revealing how the NME business model is changing to pursue new opportunities and grow new revenues.”

Now, maybe MediaGuardian just chose to not report it, but it does sound somewhat like IPC is describing a world in which NME is not more than a magazine, but post-magazine. With the news today that Company is abandoning its print edition from next month, who would bet on a weekly, paper NME having that much of a future?

In other sales news, Q is down to just over 46,000; Kerrang also slumped by still manages over 33,000 copies a week (a resilience NME can only dream of); Uncut is down to 50,000; Mojo to 70,000.

We're putting our plans to run a kickstarter to buy and relaunch Sounds on permanent hiatus.

Gordon in the morning: XX xoxoxo

Aw, here's a nice story from Gordon for a change. I say "from Gordon", he's copied it out of Q Magazine, but still. The XX are really in love with pop:

OLIVER Sim from The XX wants to work with Beyonce.

He told Q magazine: “The super-pop thing that supposedly died with Michael Jackson is still there, with Beyonce.

“I saw her at Glastonbury and I may have shed a tear. Writing a song for her, that’s the dream.”

Actually - at the moment - Beyonce has eclipsed Jackson simnply by virtue of quality control.

Who will take up the mantle of second-least-watched TV channel in the land?

Did you know NME TV vanished from the EPGs of our nation back in January? It's passing was low key, like a old soldier who'd lived a good life slipping away quietly in the night. I only realised it was gone when I was filling out an NME survey yesterday and realised that they weren't asking about the TV channel at all.

It's demise comes as no surprise - last year intensive research by Broken TV found it to be the second-least popular TV channel in the country.

So, with NME TV now apparently having made space for something called BuzMuzik, what station is replacing it in the nation's withheld affections?

Happily, Broken TV have produced an updated list of least-watched channels. (The methodology, in short, is to add together the audiences for top ten programmes on the 223 BARB counted channels for the last week of April, May and June, and then divide by 30 to get a figure for the average of the best-performing programmes on the channel.)

So, what do we discover? The bottom fifty is cluttered with music channels - Smash Hits puttering along with 12,500 viewers, for example; Kerrang just keeping ahead of Euronews down at 193; Scuzz and MTV Rocks fighting it out to be ignored by the largest number of metal fans with 9,700 and 9,470 viewers respectively.

But what at the very, very hard bottom of the list?

MyChannel is the least-bothered network in the land, with an audience of 4,170. But in the NME's old position of second-least watched channel is - of course - Q TV. 5,100 viewers, which does mean it welcomes 150 more bottoms - a whole 300 buttocks - onto sofas than NME TV was gathering in. But unfortunately, that's 250 fewer (viewers, not buttocks) than it was managing in 2010.

At the top end of the list, 4Music has dropped out the most watched fifty channels, but the R&B network Starz has taken its place as The Only Music Channel With An Actual Audience. (Also, that of all the UK TV portfolio, Yesterday's mix of Summer Wine and Nazi docs has made it the golden child.)

There's a lot more to enjoy in the tabulated data - go and have a look on Broken TV. Go on.

Demand answers from Bob Stanley

Q Magazine is apparently still going, and asking for readers' questions for Saint Etienne.

Twittergem: Lana Del Ray

Magazine tweets that it's about to publish a feature about the making of a different magazine's feature. Journalim has collapsed:

Check out this week's GRAZIA (@grazia_live) for a look at the fabulous @LanaDelRey shoot that appears in this month's @QMagazine. Hot.

— Jess Blake (@jessicaruth) January 9, 2012

Alan McGee accepts the blame

In Q Magazine's How To Buy Creation Records feature, Alan McGee issues an apology:

Ride were great from the first day I met them. They were shoegaze with tunes - a massive influence on bands like Coldplay. I hold myself responsible for fucking up their career by introducing them to The Byrds and The Beatles.

Actually, McGee is being uncharacteristically harsh on himself - certainly The Beatles were there from the get-go, as Tomorrow Never Knows shows.

Q is 25 years old

And to celebrate, it is producing 25 different covers - which is one for every reader they have left, I think.

Quick hint, Q - if you're looking to mark a quarter century of taste and discernment, this...

... might not be the way to flag that message.

Magazineobit: Tom "Tom" Hibbert

Terribly sad to read the obituary of Tom Hibbert, Smash Hits and Q writer from both magazines' Imperial Phases. You wonder what the home improvement magazines he wrote for before moving, first to New Music News, and then onto Smash Hits, made of his dry wit. At the Hits, and then in Q's Who The Hell... column, Hibbert softly punctured the pompous and puffed-up by gently measuring out the rope they'd need, and effortlessly passing it over. Besides helping with shaping the voice of the two magazines, Hibbert also had a hand in creating the quiet, raised-eyebrow style of journalism today performed by the likes of Jon Ronson and Louis Theroux. On a personal note, he gave me many happy mealtimes - on Q day, tea would always be scoffed with that opening interview propped against the sauce bottles. He'd been unable to work through illness for the last fourteen years, a terrible loss to the world of writing; his death on Sunday an even crueller loss to the world. [Thanks to HungryHatter]

Kasabian: We're not lads, honest

You know what annoys lad rockers Kasabian? It's when people call them lad rock:

Guitarist Serge Pizzorno said: "In some ways it's helped because people put you in a box and then when you don't fit in that box anymore it confuses the hell out of them.

"If you do go wild, people say 'Wow, I wasn't expecting those boys to do anything like that'.

What's great about the last record was that all the people that said it was lad rock looked silly.
"And I think finally people are going, 'OK, I got it wrong.'"

Oh, yes...

I can't think why anyone would confuse Kasabian with a boorish bunch of blonging lads.

NME plummets again

Latest music magazine circulation figures are in, and - once again - they're grim for the NME, down below 30,000.

Here's the list, with change compared to the same period last year:

The Fly: 100,386 ; -7.2%
Kerrang! : 43,033 ; -2.2%
Mojo : 87,262 ; -4.8%
New Musical Express : 29,020 ; -14.3%
Q : 80,418 ; -10.1%
Top of the Pops : 98,030 ; -6.4%
Uncut : 66,004 ; -10.9%

In sheer number terms, the falling away of Q's audience is noteworthy, too. But look at the gap Kerrang has opened up over the NME (or, more accurately, has managed to hold onto) - K! now selling 50% more than the once impregnable NME. Putting on new readers would be a big ask, but surely something must be possible to quell the vanishing audience?

Glastonbury 2011: Quick morning press round-up

There was a strange moment yesterday, following the discovery of Christopher Shale's body in the Glastonbury toilets, that showbiz reporters were forced into covering a political story. So we tended to hear about how close he was to the Wayne Rooney caravan when he died, rather than his links to the Prime Minister.

Now the papers have had a chance to catch up. But if showbiz reporters had taken on strange roles yesterday, they weren't alone. The Daily Mail reports that Michael Eavis had appointed himself coroner:

At a news conference, Mr Eavis said: ‘I’m told it was a suicide situation in the early hours of the morning … It is a personal situation, but it looks like suicide.’

To be honest, even if Shale had taken his own life - perhaps especially if Shale had taken his own life - was it really appropriate for Eavis to be giving pronouncements on how he came to die?

Back with the music, over in The Sun, Gordon struggles to think of something to say about Laura Marling:

LAURA MARLING brought a welcome touch of normality to Worthy Farm.

With so many questionably-dressed people - both on stages and in the fields - it was refreshing to see somebody wearing their usual clobber.

Apparently so "refreshing" it demanded a sneering headline:

Laura Marling’s boring Laudrobe

Now, there's a load of Glastonbury coverage on The Sun's website, but I've yet to discover any of the bloke bands who turned up in work shirts and jeans be called "boring" for failing to have worn a lion costume. Funny that.

To give Rachel at 3AM in the Mirror her due, she did attempt to review the music. A bit:

During my bum breaks, I caught Jamie Woon's set and it was fantastic. I've heard a lot about this chap, but haven't listened to his stuff before. Sitting in the middle of a field with a pounding head and cider was the perfect way to be introduced to Jamie's chilled but strong, powerful tunes.

I spent a while sitting outside the dance tent and enjoyed watching the sweaty ravers from a purely visual perspective with my Vimto lolly (three pounds! Three. Pounds).

Hang on, she's already starting to file her expense claims.

Neil McCormick in the Telegraph isn't the sort to fall back on writing about ice lollies. He's noticed that - hey - there's something funny about a big US star being on a dairy farm:

Beyonce brought the sunshine to Glastonbury. Somehow the very idea of the urban pop queen strutting her stuff in mud-spattered wellies and pac-a-mac seems wrong, illustrating the disparity between her glamorous image and the down and dirty dairy farm festivities.

Hey - did you know Neil knows Bono? Out of U2?

Removed from the comfort zone of their usual sci-fi staging, U2 were forced to rely on road warrior skills, and proved consummate crowd-pleasers whose greatest strengths lie with heart and art, not space-age showbiz. At the end of the set, Bono pulled an Irish and a Union flag from the crowd to drape over amplifiers but that was about as political as it got, if you discount the limp balloon of a tax protest.

Hmm. I know he's your big chum, Neil, but it wasn't a "limp balloon" until security thugs went in and started to push the protestors about.

Interesting, by the way, that there were other political banners which didn't have security sicced on them - for example, the Don't Buy The Sun flag held aloft in front of the Pyramid stage - which does make it look even more like Glastonbury was just closing down anti-Bono protest.

Alexis Petridis, for the Guardian, saw the set of the other controversial act from this year's line-up:

Whether or not you agree with Michael Eavis's assessment that it was a "mistake" to book the Wombles for Glastonbury, it's hard not to feel at least a little impressed by them before they even play a note of music. On its final day, Glastonbury is being blasted by pitiless sun: it's a brave person who chooses to take to the stage dressed in a giant furry costume. Equally it's hard not to be a little puzzled by their decision to open their set with their best-known hit, Remember You're A Womble: when it finishes, alas, quite a lot of their audience chose to Womble off elsewhere.

Over at NME.com, freed from the deadlines and constraints of a print edition, the Glastonbury blog is the first place to turn for the latest from the field, right? Oh, Rebecca Shiller has filed. What did she make of Beyonce?

Last night, Coldplay headlined Glastonbury for the first time since 2005.

Oh. It turns out nobody has posted anything since lunchtime on Sunday, and that was about bloody Coldplay.

To be fair, there are a couple of news posts from later in the day, but 'Beyonce played' and 'Paul Simon played' hardly feels like you're getting much in the way of special insight.

Mind you, the coverage by sponsors Q makes NME seem like Reuters. A couple of news items - most recent is "here are the highlights that you might like to see today" - and a lazy Twitter box which seems to have relied on the GlastonburyFestivals.co.uk website to do all the work - and that's it. Was that worth the sponsorship money?

[Part of Glastonbury full coverage]

Suede making stuff again

Tucked into this month's Q interview with Brett Anderson, the slightly alarming news that Suede are writing new stuff:

q: any new material [at latitude]?
ba: not likely, but we have started to write. it's early days but it's sounding interesting - we've been listening to alternative music from the early '80s, that's filtering through.

"Alternative music from the early 80s", eh? The Cure and The Chameleons style?

It could be wonderful. But I'll sit here with my fingers crossed until we know for sure.

Gordon in the morning: Grunt and grapple

Tom from Kasabian has taken a part in a sitcom.

I know what you're thinking: a remake of Terry And June is long overdue, but this doesn't sound like it's going to be as good as that. Walk Like A Panther, set in 1970s wrestling world and - according to the NME :

He'll play a mentally-deranged doorman in the '70s-set comedy, Walk Like A Panther, with TV chef Marco Pierre White set for a cameo. There are rumours that Noel Gallagher may pop up on screen somewhere.

Where would they find someone foolish enough to invest in that creaking set-up?

The whole scenario sounds like an idea first chopped up on Serge Pizzorno's coffee table at 3am. Which is probably pretty much the measure of how it came about – Serge has bankrolled the whole thing.

Oh.

It's written by Dan Cadan, which the NME thinks is a guarantee of quality:

the full line-up reveals that things could be a far more promising affair – the script has been written by Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels writer Dan Cadan

Oddly, IMDB does agree that Cadan has a credit on Lock Stock - but as "runner". By the time of Snatch, he was up to "assistant: Mr Ritchie". His writing credits prior to Panther runs to three movies - a rhyming tale about the devil, TV Movie Dancestar USA - which had Yoko Ono drift by - and Filth And Wisdom. He co-wrote that with Madonna. I'd totally forgotten "Madonna's directorial debut" even though I wrote about it at the time. More than once.

Anyway, where were we? Oh, yes, Tom Kasabian's new acting role in a sitcom written by the runner from Lock, Stock. Apparently Tom found it challenging. He told Q, and Gordon has copied it out, and now we'll copy it too:

"I loved it but I was s****ing myself first of all. When I was driving on set I was thinking, 'F*** f*** f***'. It was more nerve-racking than playing Glastonbury."

To be fair to Tom, doing something you might not be very good at in front of a crowd of people can be very nerve-wracking. So Glastonbury must be pretty scary.

But, fair play to the man, he does have a good gag up his sleeve:

"Kasabian and the music comes first. Having said that, if someone said they were remaking Labyrinth I'd be quite up for playing the part of the Goblin King."

See if Serge'll put his hands in his pockets, Tom.

The English patient

Q has appeared to have sliced up parts of its big Take That interview and given them to various newspapers - presumably allowing Fleet Street to read the scoop so you don't have to, not that you would anyway.

The Mail gets a bit which claims the band nearly changed their name when Williams came back. To The English.

The English.

I think that one nugget tells us just how much creativity there is left in this particular bucket - and if you're still in any doubt:

The album, out on November 22, is said to mark a radical change in style, with less emphasis on ballads and more experimentation with electronic pop.

Now, I could be wrong, and it might turn out to be like a latterday Kraftwerk, but this has all the hallmarks of someone bored with spaghetti bolognaise thinking that putting a splash of Worcestershire Sauce in might take it in a whole new direction.

Q, meanwhile, appears to have done such a good job of splitting the interview up that even as the Mail is happily regurgitating one part of it...

As well as new single The Flood, which is out next month, other tracks include Kidz, Pretty Things and Underground Machine, as well as an intensely personal song by Mark Owen called What Do You Want From Me?

... without apparently being told that another part explicitly says that the song isn't by Mark Owen at all.

ABCs show NME continuing downwards tumble while K! picks up

Last night was the day all magazine editors dread, when the ABC publishes circulation figures and they discover how many people they've lost from their readership. It's a lot of waving for NME.

Krissi Murison has had a year to remake the magazine in her own image, and one major redesign. So, in sheer number terms, how is she doing?

In the summer 2009 figures, NME was selling 40,948. Now? 33,875.

On a positive note, that's only a 17% year-on-year drop in sales, which is better than the quarter or so vanishing during the later years of Conor McNicholas' reign.

Making things worse for NME, it can't even point to a general malaise. Nearest rival Kerrang is now selling 44,013 - which is up from 43,253 this time last year. Not a massive increase, but an increase nevertheless. It would be turning the knife to point out it's now over 10,000 copies ahead of NME.

Q is selling 89,450 copies monthly, a 10% drop year-on-year - last summer it was selling over 100,000.

Circulation update: The Q is dethroned

Q's surprisingly long reign as biggest-selling paid-for pop magazine has come to an end, with latest ABC circulation figures seeing it drop behind Mojo.

Mojo has managed a tiny uptick in its sales over the last six months, but really claimed its crown by virtue of declining more slowly than its stablemate: Mojo lost 2% (to 98,484) year-on-year, while Q is down 8% (94,811).

Classic Rock - the worthy-but-dull option - is the only title showing an increase over the last twelve months, up 1.5% (71,242).

Over at the weeklies, Kerrang has lost 21.3% of its readers over the last 12 months (41,125), but still manages to be ahead of NME. The NME is down to 38,486, having misplaced just over one-fifth of the readership during the last twelve months.

IPC will be hoping that Krissi Murison can turn things around fairly quickly - surely the title can't afford another year of losing one-out-of-every-five readers?

Q Awards contains a surprise

Whoever said the Q Awards were predictable is going to be ordering a large slice of the most humble pie. You'd be expecting them to give best live band to Muse and best band to the Arctic Monkeys, right?

Surprise! It's the other way round. Crazy, huh?

The winners in full:

Best Act In The World: Muse
Best Live Act: Arctic Monkeys
Best Album: Kasabian - West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum
Best Track: Lily Allen - The Fear
Best New Act: White Lies
Best Breakthrough Act: Mr. Hudson
Outstanding Contribution: Robert Plant
Q Icon: Marianne Faithfull
Q Inspiration: The Specials

I don't know if the idea that Kasabian's album is worthy of our attention is more or less funny than the straight-faced presentation of a prize to Mr Hudson, the Syd Little to Kanye West's Eddie Large. Mr Hudson is not a pop star name; it's the name of a 1970s chain of trouser shops operating through seven East Midlands locations.

Q wins an award

Congratulations to Q and Love for winning a Maggie award each for magazine covers.

Showing the way that magazine design has become increasingly inventive over the years since just lobbing a half-naked woman on the front, Love won the fashion title for its naked Beth Ditto cover while Q took the overall prize for, erm, a half-naked Lily Allen.

Judging panel chairman Jim Bilton, a magazine industry veteran and managing partner of Wessenden Marketing, said: "A stunning image, strong cover lines with clear typography and an excellent 'greatest' list prominently highlighted all adds up to a winning cover creatively and commercially, producing one of the highest copy sales of the year.

"Lily wasn't a core artist for the Q readership and had heavy media coverage at the time. The solution – add panthers and a creative photo shoot – produced a truly memorable result which is our favourite cover this year."

The artist isn't really someone who Q readers want to read about so we got her to take her top off and all of a sudden, she's interesting to them.

Gordon in the morning: The clanging of the paywall

The idea, you'll recall, is for people to start paying for The Sun's insights and scoops. Just as soon as they've worked out how.

Meanwhile, the only way to ensure that people pay for tabloid stuff is to keep it in the newspaper. And by "ensure people pay", I mean "force people to borrow a copy off the bloke work".

So a couple of weeks back, the News Of The World didn't put its famous photo of Michael Jackson's death bed online, instead instructing people to pop out and buy a copy of the paper.

Clearly, team Sun has been waiting for a similar massive scoop that would persuade the ublic to switch off their computers and troop down to the newsagents, to stand reading the paper in the shop.

Today, they have something:

Yes, there seems to be some certainty at Wapping that people will pay good, hard cash for Gordon's view of what the future might hold for Oasis. You won't find that online.

(Except for when Gordon published his view of what the future might hold for Oasis yesterday.)

I can see that the paper might believe that there's money to be made out of making it harder to get to the celebrity scoops, but do they really think that Smart's speculations are so acute and valued that people will go out of their way to read them?

Elsewhere - and for free - Gordon has a "isn't Matt Bellamy nuts?" piece:

The frontman researched conspiracy theories for new album The Resistance - and then started believing them.

He ended up thinking the UK could run out of food within a fortnight so went into survivalist mode.

Matt drove to his local food store and bought all 50 tins of beans. Then he went to a DIY store to get an axe.

The rocker said: "I read somewhere a seven-day blockade and the UK would run out of oil.

"Another seven days and we'd run out of food. That's why I bought the beans. The axe would chop firewood."

The obvious questions - where did he see a fourteen-day blockade coming from, where was he going to be getting the firewood from and wouldn't it have been better to have bought firewood, how long does he think he would last with fifty tins of beans, and is it really wise to have an open fire if you're diet is consisting entirely of the musical fruit - are ignored, as Gordon shares his insight into such behaviour:

It all sounds wacky races to me.

Just to reiterate that point, there's a crosshead:

Wacky

Now, you might be wondering why this scintillating insight is being given away free. But it turns out that the whole piece is based on something Smart read in Q. You could pick up a copy when you're in the shops reading Gordon's piece.