WHEN an unknown 15-stone lesbian from Arkansas was named as the coolest person in rock music last week, the story was covered by, among others, The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and the BBC.
The sudden interest in Beth Ditto, the outspoken lead singer of a bluesy garage rock trio called The Gossip, illustrates at least two things about the media landscape.
News values have changed dramatically since the days when “quality” papers feigned a lack of interest in popular music — apart, that is, from the threat to society posed by the likes of The Rolling Stones or The Beatles.
Second, the coverage showed that after 54 years in business, the NME, or New Musical Express, remains the leading arbiter of what matters in rock and pop.
Ditto was a far from obvious choice to top the NME’s “Cool List”, although her potential to grab headlines was much clearer. You might have seen The Gossip on MTV, the music channel, but you almost certainly didn’t. The band has just 226 “friends” on the MySpace website, compared with the 65,000 fans who have declared their allegiance to Arctic Monkeys, whose lead singer Alex Turner was last year’s King of Cool.
However, the NME has a platform that allows it to shove tomorrow’s stars into the spotlight. “Look what happened with The Horrors,” said Conor McNicholas, the NME’s editor. “When we put the band on the front cover, The Times ran a story the following day. Times T2 and The Independent on Sunday ran large, two-page features the following week. That’s the function of this media property, with its 54 years of amazingly rich heritage.” The Horrors are about to begin their first national tour.
The strength of the NME brand helps explain how the magazine has managed to survive. Its long-standing rivals, such as Melody Maker and Smash Hits, were forced to close due to declining sales, victims of increased competition from mainstream media and the web. By contrast, the internet has provided one of the brightest hopes for the NME.
The fast-growing NME.com site, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, claims a 90% share of the online market for music news in Britain.
Better still for the NME’s owner, IPC Media, the website is increasingly profitable, mostly from advertising revenue.
“NME.com started making money in 2004,” said Kevin Heery at IPC’s Ignite division. “This year it will make more than double the profit that we planned for it to be making.”
Very few media properties could make such a claim in 2006. It is one reason why the NME is seen as a good example of how “old media” can rise to the digital challenge.
The magazine is still making significantly more money than NME.com, and will continue to do so for the next few years. “But the growth is the thing,” said Heery. “That gives NME.com profile even as far as the board of IPC is concerned.”
The website is drawing in a broader and more international audience — not just Britain’s tribe of “indie kids”. IPC reckons about 18% of its 1.6m users come from America, where fans are often interested in very different bands.
Encouraged by these new readers, the NME has recently set up news desks in New York and Los Angeles, and also launched an American version of Club NME — the showcase for new bands that it already runs up and down the UK.
“The news desks in New York and LA will be filing stories around the clock,” said Anthony Thornton, who last month became editor-in-chief of IPC Ignite Digital. “We will have a news team running something like 15 hours a day.”
The focus on news is seen as the key to NME.com’s success. Heery said the “fundamental change”, which became apparent about 2003, was that “if news was going to break, it had to break online rather than waiting for the magazine”.
McNicholas said this has changed the role of the weekly print publication. The world of alternative music used to run at the pace of the weekly magazines, he said. “Now we are more of an aggregator of what’s going on on the internet. We can’t constantly break news stories as we used to. Most of the time, news does a much better job on the website.”
The NME itself has become more of a news digest. Its big selling points are the longer and more thoughtful pieces that work less well on the web, and the opportunity to give proper display to photo-spreads. Weekly sales have shown steady growth in the past couple of years, although circulation is 25% down compared with 10 years ago.
Thornton said that NME.com has always been “very much ahead of the curve” in experimenting with the audio and video possibilities of the internet, but it is only in the past couple of years, with the adoption of broadband, that the multimedia possibilities have come into their own.
The site now incorporates a media player to enable users to listen to new music and watch videos. It also offers “podcast” interviews from music festivals, and behind-the-scenes video clips. The NME accordingly takes a more multi-faceted approach to covering a new album or interviewing a band.
“If a band are going to be on the cover of the magazine,” said Heery, “we will chase down some exclusive content. Journalists on the NME will go and do a piece for the magazine, but there will also be somebody there with a camera, asking questions that users have sent in. There might be an article in the magazine and a piece of video, and it might be integrated into a podcast.”
Ben Perreau, 26, editor of NME.com since July 2004, said: “We were the first place where you could hear the Arctic Monkeys album.”
The biggest names are particularly important for NME.com as it markets itself internationally through search engines. Perreau said: “One of the first things that we realised was that no matter how much we did for NME as a brand, we could never be as famous as the top 20 bands that we cover, be they Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys or U2.
“We would do better if we managed to make ourselves successful by using those bands ... as our front cover.” In other words, if you’re looking for stuff on Oasis, say, the chances are Google will lead you to NME.com.
The website has also provided space for up-and-coming acts to upload their own music, and perhaps win an audience for the first time. More than 7,000 artists have taken a page in the Breaking Bands section, a bit like a mini-MySpace. Website users can vote for the bands they like, helping to bring them to the attention of the NME’s writers.
McNicholas said this had changed the NME’s talent spotting role. “Our job now is not to go to gigs and find the next big thing, it’s saying where the action is on the internet. It’s really picking the best that’s out there.”
But the NME’s role in bringing new music to the mainstream remains unchanged, he said. “MySpace is an enormous free database of music. Some of it’s brilliant. A lot of it is not very brilliant at all. There’s no hierarchy. It’s not editorialised in any way. Users need some form of authoritative voice. How do you know where the good stuff is?” The challenge, as McNicholas admits, is identifying a new “scene” in such a fast- moving world. “Bands coalesce round certain themes, like Madchester (the group of late-1980s bands led by the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays). We used to look for patterns over six months or a year; we now look at patterns over a couple of months.”
This helps to explain a criticism often levelled at the NME — that it is too quick to enthuse about acts it would once have treated more sceptically (Lily Allen) and too eager to hype the next big thing (Arctic Monkeys).
“The key to making the magazine as successful as it can be in future will be its relationship with NME.com,” said McNicholas. “I don’t think anybody has cracked it. Turning magazine buyers into website users is not tremendously difficult. The difficult thing is turning website users into magazine buyers.”
