Remembering the golden era of music magazines – National | 24CA News

When I used to be in highschool and college, each Wednesday afternoon required to the Rexall drug retailer in my small prairie hometown. That was the day any new music magazines appeared within the racks. Using cash I earned stocking cabinets within the native grocery retailer, I’d seize the newest editions of Rolling Stone (which got here out each two weeks), and monthlies like CREEM, Trouser Press, and Circus for worldwide news, and Music Express to study what was occurring in Canada.

My mother and father had been appalled, in fact, at what they thought of a waste of cash. And once I introduced house the notorious Rolling Stone challenge — “Rock is Sick and Living in London” — that includes the Sex Pistols on the duvet (a newsstand gross sales catastrophe for the journal in October 1978), my mother and father brazenly puzzled if I wanted to be institutionalized for my very own good.

My music journal behavior solely acquired worse over the a long time. Occasionally, I’d see a replica of Melody Maker or The NME — horribly outdated by the point they arrived in Canada — in a specialty bookstore and seize them for a have a look at the oh-so-exotic scene within the UK. When Chapters and Indigo arrived with their large choice, my spending on music magazines grew to a number of thousand {dollars} a yr.

By this time, there was additionally Alternative Press, Raygun, Option, Shift, Maximum RocknRoll, and Modern Drummer all from the U.S. with home backfill from Canadian Musician, Chart Attack, and Graffiti. I purchased all of them, on a regular basis. But most of my money went to British publications.

There had been so many nice magazines from the U.Okay., particularly within the late Nineties — Q, Select, Vox, Mojo, Record Collector, Uncut, The Word, The Face, Smash Hits, Sounds, Kerrang — and a bunch of others I do know I’m lacking. I hoovered them up each month, storing again points fastidiously on cabinets within the basement. This shaped an indispensable analysis archive for my Ongoing History of New Music radio present.

How may the British help a lot music journalism? Loads needed to do with the position the music press had carved out for itself since a minimum of the Nineteen Fifties. With BBC radio refusing to play or cowl common music past a number of hours per week — too lowbrow for the Beeb — print was the one place to study The Beatles, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Eric Clapton, and all the nice U.Okay. stars. Yes, there have been non-public broadcasts from Radio Luxemburg and pirate stations like Radio Caroline, however for those who needed your music to be lined in-depth, you wanted the weeklies and monthlies.

British publications turned not simply data sources, however arbiters of style, anointers of stars, and laid waste to acts that bored them. They additionally believed it was their solemn obligation to push music tradition ahead by figuring out (and sometimes inventing or outright fabricating) new scenes and sounds. The weeklies, NME and Melody Maker, had been superb at this, every in its personal means. Folk, trad jazz, folks, psych, glam, punk, ska, rockabilly, New Romantics, C-86, acid home, rave, shoegaze, Madchester, Britpop — none would have flourished as they did had it not been for the protection and occasional fictions created by British music magazines.

Alas, although, the golden age for music magazines has handed. With the rise of the web, it was not crucial to attend for {a magazine} to inform you what was occurring. Circulation dropped precipitously. Meanwhile, declining bodily report gross sales meant a deadly drop in promoting by report labels. Margins shrank after which disappeared. Experienced employees noticed story commissions dry up and had been finally laid off. Ownership was consolidated and razor-sharp give attention to writing and interviews suffered. Bloggers and streamers turned the brand new influencers.

Outside of Mojo and Record Collector, there are valuable few bodily publications I nonetheless purchase, though usually with misgivings. Don’t the publishers understand that these of us who nonetheless purchase bodily magazines don’t have the eyesight we as soon as did? Why is a lot of every challenge in six-point fonts?

So many once-great and bloody important magazines have gone out of business. Graffiti was passed by 1986. Sounds turned extinct in 1991. It turned unattainable to get Music Express after Christmas 1996. Vox disappeared in the summertime of 1998. Having stood by itself since 1926, Melody Maker was folded into rival NME in 2001 with Select ceasing publication across the identical time. Smash Hits died in 2006. Q, which underwent a minimum of half a dozen re-launches in a bid to outlive, lastly gave up the ghost in 2020.

Some have transitioned to on-line. There would possibly nonetheless be bodily editions of Rolling Stone and Alternative Press — that can inform you how lengthy it’s been since I’ve checked out {a magazine} rack — so I dip in on occasion while looking.

But there are a few causes to be optimistic. Online subscriptions are far cheaper than having points mailed to you, particularly from abroad. Information arrives commonly and promptly, not two or three months old-fashioned. And it may be immeasurably extra handy to take a bunch of studying materials on an iPad for an extended flight.

And there are indicators of bodily life. Kerrang retains the religion as a quarterly. CREEM journal can be again as a four-times-a-year publication that, boy howdy, is as irreverent as problems with outdated. Meanwhile, after 5 years of being online-only, The NME has returned as a print publication this summer time with a promise of six points a yr. And Mojo and Record Collector appear to be in it for the lengthy haul.

Oh, and that archive of outdated magazines in my basement? They turned a hearth hazard and a possible metropolis for rodents, so I pawned all of them off on a man who ran a used report retailer. I see now that was a mistake as a result of many points are actually coveted by collectors. That consists of my outdated “Rock is Sick” version of Rolling Stone. I simply noticed it up for public sale with an asking value of US$770.

—

Alan Cross is a broadcaster with Q107 and 102.1 the Edge and a commentator for Global News.

Subscribe to Alan’s Ongoing History of New Music Podcast now on Apple Podcast or Google Play

&copy 2023 Corus Radio, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.