Badnuss (caution contains Other Place content)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Chuck Eddy fired from Village Voice music section.

No Eddy, no NYLPM. (about half our links used to be to Voice features. The other half were slagging off the Guardian)
No Eddy on the Voice, no ILXers in the Voice (and fewer Voicers in ILX)
No Eddy, no ILX come to think of it. (thf. no Poptimists)
ect ect

Best of luck Chuck in whatever you do next.

The future of print music writing has looked murky for a long time: I worry somewhat for the good writers and people I know who are involved in it.

(time for DJ Martian's new darkwave zine then!)

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Actually the most irritating thing isn't the existence of supply-demand rules but the way their selective application trends towards duller output viz.

- magazine's music section low on ad revenue
- THEREFORE they lose the editor and put someone new in
- magazine loses even more ad revenue
- the reasoning then becomes not "We made a mistake changing it" but "This is a general downward trend and there was nothing we could have done." Music section is axed entirely.

The self-image of business is strongly weighted to protect any executive decisions (see also: blaming bad performance on people's reluctance to 'embrace change'). It's only when the failure is public and huge - eg New Coke - that reversal is accepted.

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

I agree with freakytrigger here - it's not that 'demographics' in themselves are de facto bad but the faults come when decision-makers fail to realise fully what the demographic is/chase another one which isn't interested.

As an aside from this, does the NME sell more now than it did in the early-mid 90s, after embarking upon this massive programme of brand-building and ever more tightly-defining its demographic (so it now reads 'fans of a maximum of 12 bands)?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Latest ABC figures have the NME on 76,000 - and climbing but climbing quite slowly. This is 20k under what Smash Hits was selling when it was cancelled, incidentally.

The NME brand building has been about delivering a tight and highly desirable demographic to advertisers rather than increasing circulation, though.

I don't know what it did in the mid-90s. When I started reading in the Madchester era it was on about 120k, which then was (I think) seen as fairly healthy but not impressive.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I would ban all advertising from magazines and newspapers if I could, if only because every publication I have EVER been involved with has at some point featured someone rabbiting ON AND ON AND BLOODY ON about advertising to me and it is usually at the expense of something good in the, y'know, actual content. And I don't care if that means nothing can be funded!!!!!!!!!!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yes but my horrible suspicion is that the decision-makers realise all too well what the demographic is!