NME

• 1. Introduction

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  NME was bought for £1,000, just fifteen minutes before it was due to close for good. That was 1952, when a London music promoter named Maurice Kinn spotted a struggling newspaper called The Accordion Times and Musical Express and decided it was worth saving. He relaunched it as the New Musical Express, and within weeks it had done something no British publication had ever done before: it published the country's first singles chart. What had been a niche trade sheet would go on to shape the sound of nearly every decade that followed. How did a tabloid printed on cheap newsprint become the voice of punk, the launchpad of Britpop, and eventually a free magazine distributed on commuter trains to millions? And what happens to a music bible when the music industry itself stops selling paper?

• 2. The Chart That Changed Everything

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  On the 14th of November 1952, NME published a list of twelve records. It was the first UK Singles Chart, compiled not by a national data system but by the magazine itself, drawing on sales reports from regional stores across Britain. The idea came from the American magazine Billboard, and editor Ray Sonin used it to give the new paper an instant reason for readers to come back every week. The number one on that first chart was "Here in My Heart" by Al Martino. Sales of the New Musical Express jumped by fifty percent almost immediately. The chart gave the paper authority before it had established a voice, and that authority would prove durable. By the time NME peaked in the 1960s under editor Andy Gray, its circulation had reached 306,881 copies for the period January to June 1964, a figure driven in large part by its coverage of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Those same artists performed at the NME Poll Winners' Concerts, a reader-voted event held between 1959 and 1972, with performances filmed and broadcast on British television from 1964 onward.

• 3. Punk and the Hip Young Gunslingers

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  In early 1972, after sales had collapsed to 60,000 and a reviewer had accidentally described guitar instrumentalist Duane Eddy as singing on his thirty-fifth album, NME's owner IPC gave the paper a stark choice: change or close. Editor Alan Smith and his assistant Nick Logan responded by raiding the underground press. They brought in writers like Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent, and the paper began to feel genuinely dangerous. By the time Logan took over the editor's chair in mid-1973, the paper was selling nearly 300,000 copies per week. Writer Ian MacDonald later described the atmosphere: the paper had most of the best writers and photographers, the best layouts, and a sense of real adventure. In 1976, NME insulted Kraftwerk with a headline reading "This is what your fathers fought to save you from," and described the band's electronic melodies as flowing "as slowly as a piece of garbage floating down the polluted Rhine." That same year, punk arrived. NME gave the Sex Pistols their first music press coverage in a live review of their Marquee performance in February 1976, though it was slower to embrace the scene than its rivals. To fix that, the paper placed a now-famous advertisement seeking a pair of "hip young gunslingers." The two people hired were Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill. Parsons later wrote about his NME years in his 2005 novel Stories We Could Tell, set on the night of the 16th of August 1977, the night Elvis Presley died.

• 4. Cassettes, Socialism, and the Hip-Hop Wars

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  In 1981, NME released a cassette compilation called C81, in partnership with Rough Trade Records, sold to readers by mail order at a low price. It featured then-unknown acts including Aztec Camera, Orange Juice, and Scritti Politti alongside more established names like Robert Wyatt and Pere Ubu. Between 1981 and 1988, the magazine released 36 such cassette compilations. The paper's politics ran alongside its music coverage. In the week of the 1987 general election, Labour leader Neil Kinnock appeared on the front cover; he had also appeared there in April 1985. But sales were falling, and the paper was caught in what staff called the "hip-hop wars" -- a battle between writers who wanted to cover this American genre and those who insisted on rock. Sales apparently fell when hip-hop artists appeared on the cover. Three senior editorial staff were dismissed in the summer and autumn of 1987, including editor Ian Pye, and former Sounds editor Alan Lewis was brought in to stabilise things. Lewis prioritised circulation over editorial independence; in 1988, he refused to print writer Mark Sinker's review of U2's Rattle and Hum, which Sinker had called "the worst album by a major band in years," replacing it with a more favourable notice.

• 5. Britpop and the Blur-Oasis Race

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  In April 1994, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was found dead, and NME coined a term for what came next. The word "Britpop" was the paper's own invention, first applied after Blur released their album Parklife in the same month as Cobain's death. For the next several years, Britpop was the defining story in British music, and NME was at its centre. The paper sponsored the second stage at Glastonbury from 1993 through 1995, the stage that subsequently became known as the Other Stage. In August 1995, Blur and Oasis planned to release singles on the same day. Editor Steve Sutherland put the competition on the front page, was criticised for amplifying the rivalry, and watched the paper's sales climb regardless. Blur won the chart race. The coverage brought the paper to a commercial high point before Britpop burned itself out. A 1998 cover story on Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor sent sales to a low, and Sutherland publicly stated he regretted the decision. From the issue of the 21st of March 1999, the paper stopped printing on newsprint entirely and shifted to a glossy format.

• 6. Free, Digital, and the Ownership Question

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  NME.com launched in 1996 under editor Brendan Fitzgerald. In November 1999, the site hosted the UK's first webcast, a Suede concert called "Live in Japan." By 2006, the site had 1.6 million users worldwide. In 2011, it had over seven million monthly unique users. In 2014, the print magazine's paid circulation had fallen to 15,830 copies. The free relaunch came on the 18th of September 2015, with Rihanna on the cover, distributed via universities, retail stores, and the transport network. The first circulation figure published in February 2016 showed 307,217 copies per week, beating the previous all-time record of 306,881 set in 1964. By December 2017, that figure had slipped to 289,432 copies a week. In March 2018, the print edition folded after 66 years, and the publication moved entirely online. In 2019, the company was sold to Singapore-based BandLab Technologies. In December 2021, BandLab was reorganised into Caldecott Music Group, placing NME under a new division called NME Networks, which also includes Guitar.com and MusicTech. On the 20th of July 2023, NME announced it would revive its print edition as a bimonthly release. Chief operating officer Holly Bishop said the company was inspired by what she called "the resurgence we've seen in vinyl and cassette tapes" -- a return to physical formats that NME itself had championed with its own cassette series four decades earlier.