History
The New Musical Express (or NME as it is known) was first published on 17th March 1952. Maurice Kinn, a music promoter from London, bought the Musical Express and Accordion Weekly and merged and re lunched them; the NME was born. It is now owned by IPC Media and has a circulation of 33,875 (January – June 2010). The NME was inspired by Billboard in the US by making a UK Singles Chart or ‘hit parade’ as they called it. The NME was responsible for publishing the first singles chart on 14th November 1952.
To survive and thrive, the NME has had to adapt and develop over the years along with the market but is now an established and trusted magazine. It has changed format and changed the genre of music it has covered.
To survive and thrive, the NME has had to adapt and develop over the years along with the market but is now an established and trusted magazine. It has changed format and changed the genre of music it has covered.
Development
During the 1960s, the NME was responsible for championing new bands such as The Beatles, tapping into the feeling of youth rebellion. The paper was bought by IPC from Maurice Kinn in 1963. The NME held the NME Poll Winners Concert where readers voted for the artists to appear at it. Those were broadcast on television from 1964. Towards the middle and the end of the 1960s, psychedelia started to dominate the NME and more and more bands were inspired by it. NME’s closest rival in the 1960s was Melody Maker and there was a lot of rivalry between them and the NME but the NME still sold 200,000 copies a week.
At the beginning of the 1970s, NME started to come into trouble as its popularity was falling to Melody Maker. They had lost readers because they failed to keep up with rock music that was constantly changing. At this point, readership was at 60,000 and it was now under threat of being closed by its owners IPC. It was time for drastic action. Alan Smith was made editor of the NME and had to turn things around quickly. Before then, the paper had been quite uncritical but under the leadership of Alan Smith it changed to being more cynical and funny. This tactic undoubtedly worked and the NME’s sales rose to 300,000 in 1973, up from 60,000 earlier on in the 1970s. In 1976, punk arrived. In the past, the NME had been slow to adopt and recognise new styles of music; they were now leading new styles of music. The NME was the first paper to give the Sex Pistols their first coverage. In 1978, the NME was given a new logo and a slightly altered version of that logo is still used today. The NME started to become more political towards the end of the 1970s to reflect the views of their punk audience.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister and the NME responded by championing socialism. The paper no longer featured just bands and musicians on the front cover but sometimes politicians too. For example, the leader of the Labour Party Neil Kinnock appeared on the Front Cover in 1987. However, sales began to drop again and the NME once again was under threat of closure. The paper had lost its direction – some of its writers wanted to continue to write about rock and other wanted to write about hip-hop. When hip-hop artists appeared on the front cover of the NME, sales dropped and this only made the lack of direction within the NME more obvious to its readers. They were starting to loose readers to Smash Hits. Three senior editors were sacked, including media editor Stuart Cosgrave and the art editor Joe Ewart. Alan Lewis, who was the former editor of Sounds, was bought in to rescue the paper. At first, staff where unsure about their new editor and even signed a letter of no confidence. However, Alan Lewis’s new direction for the NME was a success. He bought in new writers like Stuart Maconie and Steve Lamacq. 
In 1990, the NME started covering indie bands coming out of Manchester. But, towards the end of 1990, the Manchester scene was starting to die and the government was trying to ban Acid House so the NME started to report on Grunge bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam from America. After Kurt Cobain (the frontman of Nirvania) died in 1994, the NME started to report on Britpop rather than Grange band from America. This started when Blur released their first album ‘Parklife’. Blur and Oasis were the biggest bands in the UK and sales of the NME rose because of this. In August 1995 both Blur and Oasis decided to release singles on the same day and the story made the front cover of the NME. By the end of the 1990s, Britpop had begun to die out and the NME looked like it had lost its direction again. In 1998, the NME made one of the biggest changes to its look and style ever. It went from being in a newspaper style to a more magazine style and was tabloid size with glossy, color front covers.
In 2000, NME merged with its main rival Melody Maker and Melody Maker closed. The NME started to cover a broader range of bands again in the early 2000s. They run cover stories on hip-hop artists like Jay-Z and R & B bands like Destiny’s Child. However, these were unpopular with the audience as they had been in the past so the NME narrowed the bands that they covered again. In 2001, they started to champion new bands like The White Stripes again. Conor McNicholas became the editor in 2002 and the NME started to champion new indie bands (e.g. The Libertines, Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser Chiefs). Circulation of the magazine has continued to fall over the 2000s.
Technology
Technology
As the internet has taken off, the NME website (NME.com) has become just as important as the magazine itself. It first launched in 1996. The NME use their website in a wide range of ways. For instance, they run the first ever life webcast and gave away The Stroke’s first single ‘Last Nite’ a week before it was released. The website currently has a wide range of content; for example music news, photos from gigs, music videos, blogs and reviews. The NME website has 5 million monthly unique views and is the largest music magazine website in the UK.
As well as the website, the NME has also launched the NME Festivals app for smartphones, which launched in May 2011. NME also launched its first iPad app in June 2011.
Target audience
Target audience
The NME has a circulation (the number of people who have bought the magazine) of over 56,000 and has a readership (the number of people who have read the magazine but not necessarily bought it) of 411,000. The NME targets itself at men aged 17 – 30. In reality, the average age of an NME reader is 25 and 73% of its readers are male and 27% of readers are female. The NME does lots of research into its audience to build up a picture of their typical reader. According to their own research, 80% of NME readers feel that live music is an important part of their lives. The NME readers are also used to using computers. 93% of them own a computer, 96% have access to the internet, 72% have broadband at home and 56% visit NME.com every day or every few days.
