Music Press - a brief history

Music Press – A Brief History

1950s and 1960s

In November 1952, NME (The New Musical Express) was introduced to the general public. NME was a music magazine that mainly focused on rock music and the genre that covered it. However NME was not the first music magazine due to Melody Maker being on sale since 1926, Melody Maker was a rock and pop magazine that was popular with the general audience. NME was the first magazine to have a chart within it, but unlike music magazines in the present day the reviews of the music was generally positive and there were never any negative comments to the artists or songwriters, although this did then change during the 1960s with the appearance of bands such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. In the 1960s the entire music industry changed due to the drug culture that was soon adopted by many.

1970s

During the 1970s there was a new rock genre, punk music. Punk music celebrated garage bands and many self-produced albums were created. The punk genre was usually faster than other musicians in this time period, such as David Bowie, and most of the music included within the punk genre had anti – establishment and political lyrics included within their songs. It was around this time that NME began to embrace the punk genre by branching out the topics included in the magazine to feature philosophy and politics for example. However due to this change in target audience NME, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, had its readership numbers fall as it began to focus too much on politics. In the mid-70s there was a divide between music magazine due to some writing about the music and the performance, Melody Maker, and the magazines that wrote about the bands views and messages included within the lyrics.

1980s

During the 1980s many music magazines began to look towards younger readers as the target audience for their magazines. They did this by experimenting with new layouts, topics and fonts, which ultimately proved to be popular with younger readers. For example the magazine BLITZ became incredibly popular with the younger readers due to the content that it included due to it suiting the target demographic of its readership.

1990s

There was a huge amount of change during the 1990s due to all of the new technologies available, this was most apparent with the introduction of MTV. A new type of television channel was created which would then feature all of the newest singles with their music videos meant that songs got a new type of publicity. MTV meant that all new singles created now came with a music video, which therefore meant that some songs became successful due to the video and not the quality of song, a huge change from previous decades. This meant that the format of the music press had changed from magazine to television

Present

Nowadays there are blogs that have been set up that review music singles that have taken over from magazines; they are more popular due to their more equal views and not the views of a large company. Many music artists do a lot of publicity on the internet in order to appeal to its largest readership section, teenagers, who spend more time on the internet instead watching TV or reading magazines. This had meant that there has been a decline for every magazines readership due to most of the content being found online. Magazines try to keep their readers by having interviews with artists who are popular within the genre. NME has changed by including more than one genre in its magazine and also strayed away from the punk genre entirely. Most of today’s music magazine content features top charts and interviews, with most content simplified for the non-avid music fans.