Feature: Pop Goes The Indie Music Mag Market
Pop is dead. Long live pop. Or, if not pop, then certainly indie as we knew it throughout the early nineties. It is perhaps around this time that indie, previously synonymous with the term alternative, began to edge its way into the mainstream. Dance music also boomed with the emergence of new ‘super-clubs’ around the country and indie at the margins dwindled somewhat.
These changes can be seen in music magazine sales trends over the last ten years. In 1993 we had, along with inkies Melody Maker and NME, Emap’s Select and IPC’s Vox. Each of these titles predominately covered guitar-based rock and indie music. At this point none of the dance titles – Ministry, Mixmag and Muzik – had yet launched. From the mid-nineties onwards the scene began to shift. All of the indie titles saw the beginning of long term circulation declines and in early 1998 IPC closed Vox after sales had fallen from a peak of 112,000 in 1994 to just 55,000. Last week Emap announced the closure of Select, citing indie’s move to the mainstream as the reason for the title’s long-declining circulation. In the January-June 2000 ABC audit Select‘s circulation was down 13% year on year to 50,000 copies, well below its peak sales of 112,000 in ’95. At the same sales of NME and Melody Maker have continued to fall, with the Maker undergoing a reformat and repositioning at the end of last year.
During the last five years, dance titles, on the other hand, have gone from strength to strength. Mixmag, launched by Emap in 1994, has grown its circulation from 43,000 copies to 96,000 this year – a year on year rise of 43%. Similarly the Ministry Of Sound’s official magazine, Ministry, has seen sales growth from just over 60,000 in 1998 to 95,000 in the last audit. IPC’s Muzik, whilst dropping slightly in the last audit, has held sales steady at just over 40,000 for the last five years.
In fact, in is only the performance of the dance titles, as well as a good figures from teen title Smash Hits, which prevented the music sector from turning in a substantial decline. Emap’s broader-based monthly Q is the company’s best-selling music mag, with circulation hovering around 200,000. Q is the first of Emap’s reinvigorated online music offerings with the new Q4music.com site just launched. However, observers are questioning whether it is too late for the launch of new music sites into what is already a crowded marketplace. Publishers maybe in danger of cannibalising their print audience rather than augmenting their reader-base.
