Written off?

If the uneasy relationship between the internet and the music industry has taught us anything, it’s that too many people today believe they shouldn’t have to pay anything (or at least any more than they think they should) to listen to the music they love. Equally, it seems these same people believe they shouldn’t have to pay to read about the music they love either.

While pretty much every music magazine is seeing a rapid decline in sales, no one seems to be feeling the increasingly painful pinch more than NME, once that bastion of cutting edge new music eagerly awaited each week by the faithful and now little more than a flimsy, overpriced shop window for the online version (which, incidentally, attracts around seven millions users a month).

Having enjoyed six-figure circulation figures at the peak of its success, the magazine struggles to entice more than around 15,000 people a week to part with their hard-earned cash – and at £2.50 a pop for something that can be read cover to cover during an average toilet visit, who can blame them?

Something’s gotta give and that something, it seems, is the cover price. Having realised that they can’t sell it anymore, the people at NME have now decided to see if they can literally give it away. Yep, from September, NME will be free, moving from the newsstands to railway stations, shops and student unions instead – an indie Metro, if you will.

It’s hardly a surprising move, although what IS surprising is that NME has managed to cling on for dear life for so long. In its heyday, it was the first port of call for anyone eager to find out when their favourite band’s next album was coming out or whether they would be touring nearby. It was also THE place to read about exciting new bands you wouldn’t see in the mainstream press.

Today, thanks to the old information superhighway, your favourite band have just used their Facebook page and Twitter feed to link to a brief YouTube teaser for their next album. As a loyal fan, you’ve received advance notice of their tour dates via email (no more filling in and sending off those postcards inserted into the record or CD cover so that you can then receive more postcards) and you can even tweet the band directly to express your delight at the fact they’re playing at the Dogger’s Arms in Kettering or to vent your frustration because they’ve wisely given your hometown a wide berth yet again. Oh, and you’ve probably already discovered enough new music online to fill five issues of NME before its writers have even thought of an opening line for an article telling you why Rustic Scrotum or Panda Pop Holocaust are the future of all our lives.

In a digital age, no one wants to wait until next Wednesday to find out when Damon Albarn’s concept album about sandwiches is going to be released. They want it now, dammit.

But there’s another issue – granted, not one that will have had a huge impact on their already plummeting sales figures but which I believe is still an issue all the same.

It’s fair to say that the quality of the product has decreased significantly over the past decade (if not longer). Gone are the days of in-depth critical analysis of this week’s new albums – now everything feels dumbed down and diluted, like it’s been written by an excitable work experience kid (and from what I’ve heard, that’s probably not too wide of the mark). Everything is brief and to the point (whatever that may be), but without any depth, personality or genuine passion. Where’s the individual writing style? Where’s the sense of pride in your work? Nah, the industry just wants short, punchy phrases it can plaster across adverts, posters and stickers on CD covers. Don’t try to be too clever or creative – we can’t fit it on the sticker, not with that five-star rating we’ve included from The Sun and Heat! And no, you can’t give this one a bad review – we’ve already decided as a publication that we like this band because they might be the next Arctic Monkeys.

Also, considering we live in an age where the media have never had more research tools at their disposal, a little basic fact-checking wouldn’t go amiss here and there, NME. That includes your website and its relentless stream of ’25 albums you just HAVE to hear before you turn 27’-type clickbait.

As part of its ‘rebranding’ (and why is everything just a brand these days?), NME’s distribution will be increased to 300,000 copies, presumably because increased circulation means they can not only attract more advertising but also charge more for the privilege of advertising in a magazine you’re now more likely to find lying face down on a sticky train carriage floor.

Will this additional advertising revenue be invested back into the product? Will they employ quality writers who actually understand the music they are writing about, rather than simply picking up on the latest generic white male guitar four-piece because they’ve got the right hair and clothes? Will they resist the urge to create more double-page spreads out of the fact Noel Gallagher has said SOMETHING CONTROVERSIAL AGAIN? Will they stop writing articles about Muse with lazy headlines such as ‘Apocalypse Wow’? Will they just stop writing about Mumford & Sons altogether?

We can but hope – but we probably shouldn’t hold our breath.

2014: that was the year that wasn't (part one)

I realise I come across as a happy-go-lucky kind of person without a care in the world, but there are still a few people on this here planet capable of getting right on my tits.

Anyway, it's always better out than in, as they say, so in the first of two articles I thought I'd vent some steam over famous people who have no concept of my existence but have still managed to wind me up in some way.

Coldplay

Let no one say that Chris Martin isn’t consistent. Six albums in and every line he utters still sounds like a feeble apology for disappointing sex, while the other three (the ones who AREN’T Chris Martin) sit there like the three members of U2 who aren’t Bono – smug in the knowledge that however ridiculous their frontman looks and sounds, they’ll still be raking it in.

It wasn’t just his music that irritated this year either – the announcement of Martin’s split from Gwyneth Paltrow (I don’t know which one of them should be more relieved, frankly) could only have been more pretentious had they arranged for doves to deliver hand-written parchments to every household in the world.

The group’s seventh album, A Head Full Of Dreams, with its title presumably chosen from a competition open only to infant school pupils, is due for release next year. Martin’s once again dragging out the whole ‘this album might be our last’ bollocks which he’s been peddling since at least the second album.

We can only hope he’s telling the truth this time, although I won’t be holding my breath – life isn’t that kind.

Incidentally, this year also gave us the greatest review of a Coldplay album you’ll ever read. Seriously. Read it here.

Paris Hilton

This year, professional oxygen thief Paris Hilton was named ‘Female DJ of the Year’ by French youth station NRJ. Okay, it’s not exactly a Grammy and in the grand scheme of things it probably won’t have any significant impact on the course of human progress, but it does beg the question: has Paris Hilton EARNED any sort of award for her ‘DJing’?

As anyone who has seen videos of Hilton in action (no, not THOSE videos) will tell you, she does a lot of dancing, pointing and pretending to fiddle with stuff, but very little in the way of actual DJing (some videos show a ‘helper’ who hides behind the decks and does all the technical stuff that Hilton doesn’t need to do because she’s too busy dancing, pointing and pretending to fiddle with stuff). The downside of recent advancements in DJ technology is that you can pretty much get your equipment to do all the work for you – stick Hilton behind a pair of 1210s with a stack of vinyl and we’ll see how well she fares then.

Paris Hilton is a DJ only because she has seen someone do it, decided she wants to have a go and her people have made it happen. She hasn’t worked to get where she is today. Where most DJs spend years finding their sound, hunting down rare tracks and generally paying their dues to whatever scene they aspire to be part of, Hilton has simply snapped her fingers and become a DJ, just because she’s used to getting her own way. In fact, everything she has ever achieved in life has been purely down to the fact she was excreted from a rich woman’s nether regions nearly 34 years ago, rather than because she’s actually any good at anything.

To be named ‘Female DJ of the Year’ is also an insult to every female DJ who has had to strive for recognition in what has traditionally been seen as a male-dominated industry where a woman behind the decks is, unfortunately, still treated as some sort of novelty (for example, the words ‘female DJ’ might appear in brackets after their name on a flyer – you wouldn’t list a DJ’s skin colour or sexuality in the same way, would you?).

Memo to Hilton’s ‘people’: you can put an end to this. This is your time to shine. The world is depending on you.

Alex Turner

If I’m honest, there’s always been a whiff of the emperor’s new clothes about Arctic Monkeys. I don’t dislike them, as such, but I’ve just never found them worthy of all the hype that seems to have surrounded them throughout their career.

However, it’s not the band themselves that have particularly irritated me this year, it’s that bequiffed twat of a frontman, Alex Turner. He wasn't quite so bad in the early days when he generally didn’t have very much to say, but more recently the fame and success seem to have gone to his Brylcreemed little head, to the point where he appears to have adopted the voice of an Elvis impersonator for his between-song gig banter. He doesn’t look like a rock star: he looks like someone PRETENDING to be a rock star.

The glistening cherry on the cake, however, was his excruciating acceptance speech at this year’s Brit Awards, in which he adopted the expression of a teenage boy about to tell his giggling mates about how he’d lost his virginity at last night’s party, before launching into a frankly bizarre lecture about rock ‘n’ roll and how it will never die.

He even talked about rock ‘n’ roll being ready to “smash through the glass ceiling”, as if white-dominated guitar music had somehow spent the last half- century being brutally oppressed by the music industry.

This tax-dodging ‘man of the people’ then finished his little routine by telling organisers to “invoice me for the microphone if you wanna” before dropping said microphone on the floor in the style of a petulant child who’s just been ordered to tidy his room.

Rather predictably, the increasingly irrelevant NME creamed its pants and stuck Turner in all his quifftastic glory on its front page, hailing him as the leader of some new rock ‘n’ roll revolution – a cover which will probably go down as one of the most embarrassing in the magazine’s once respectable history.

Shush now, Alex - grown-ups are talking. 

Tom Odell

For that abomination of a song used on the John Lewis advert, above all else. The fact it’s a cover is irrelevant – the end result is still the musical equivalent of waking up on a cold winter’s morning to find yourself covered in someone else’s vomit.

Odell’s strained – nay, strangulated – voice can’t seem to decide whether it’s trying to yawn or let out a desperate yet futile cry for someone, ANYONE to put it out of its misery. This is doubtless what Odell himself fancies as deep and meaningful – the mark of a REAL musician trying to convey REAL feelings and yet still managing to sound like an X-Factor contestant refused a place in the final because “the standard is particularly high this year and you just haven’t got what it takes”.

Like Ed Sheeran, I struggle to see the appeal of Odell. Unlike Sheeran, I don’t know anyone who actually likes Odell’s music. That said, there’s undoubtedly a budding musician sitting in a coffee shop somewhere, guitar in hand, telling their largely indifferent audience that they need Tom Odell’s album in their lives.

That’s a brave move in a room full of people brandishing boiling hot drinks, isn’t it?

Katie Hopkins

I’m loathe to give this hateful excuse for a human being any more publicity than I have to, but it’s impossible to write about people who have irritated me this year without including her.

I can’t even be bothered to repeat anything she’s said (Google her if you’re that desperate), but I will say this: someone, somewhere, at some point has wronged her (possibly in a fairly trivial way) and she has retaliated by embarking on some sort of ideological mission to vomit venom at everything in her line of vision. This extends to banning her own offspring from mixing with other children based on their names, in case they should tarnish her little darlings’ delicate minds and, presumably, their prospects of marrying somebody rich, gullible and on the verge of a heart attack.

I’ll also say this: she looks like someone skinned a horse and then applied lipstick and a Miss Piggy wig. Just banter, Katie.