NME Magazine Analysis

New Music Express is the full title of the commonly known magazine NME. It is the longest going music magazine and has had issues published weekly since 1952. They started as a newspaper at first, and then changed into a magazine format. Their award winning website has become the largest commercial site in Europe for music, and now has over five millions users a month. In the 1970’s NME became the best-selling newspaper in Britain and was the first to feature the ‘singles chart’ starting the trend for future magazines. From 1998 onwards, NME transformed into a glossy magazine format. In 2009 Kris Murison took over and became the first female Editor of NME; however the current editor is Jo Smalley. Their website ‘NME.com’ is currently edited by Mike Williams. The target audience of the magazine is from 17-35, so pricing the magazine at £2.80 is a reasonable amount, as the consumer will be earning a sufficient amount of money to pay for the magazine weekly, as they have some disposable income. The magazine has a gender ratio of 66% male, and 34% female. So it doesn’t completely eliminate a female audience; therefore reaching a wide range of people increasing its profit. On average the consumer spends forty six minute reading each issue which infers that they are interested with the content they are receiving, as they don’t quickly scan over each page, they actually are taking the time to read the issue. 96% of the target audience of NME have access to the internet, showing how convergent the magazine is, and that it can be used on different platforms, attracting a wider audience.


  In the 1960’s bands and artist like The Beatles and The Rolling stones would feature on NME. During this era the paper started to promote the rise of supremacy of British groups. This began the merging of pop music in NME and Rock. During this time the sales of the paper were around 200,000 copies being sold per issue. In 2000 NME started to feature artists such as Jay Z, Missy Elliot, in order to have a larger target audience, by also featuring R&B/ Rap artists. However as they have had a target audience that were interested in the rock genre they lost a lot of their artists, so consequently stopped with the new added genre. A point of success for NME is when they started to promote Indie genre bands. The magazine continued to emerge when they started to feature bands such as The Kaiser Chiefs, The Artic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand.


  The magazine uses convergence by not only having the biggest commercial site in Europe, but they also host NME awards in Texas. They also have their own app available to download on iTunes. You can also subscribe and receive each issue to your Kindle to read. Another platform being they have their own YouTube channel. NME also is the winner of many awards such as ‘Music Media brand of the year in 2013.’ On social networking sites they have over 470,000 likes on Facebook, 710,000 followers on Twitter and over 31,000 followers on Instagram. NME is owned by IPC media, a successful and highly stated publisher. However in 1972 they found themselves at the point of closure, and therefore ending NME. Alan Smith was made editor and turned the paper around. He made dramatic changes which dominated and ruined other music papers such as Melody Maker and Disc.