Paul Scaife and David Balfour ponder the plight of music journalism and the future of the Record of the Day Awards

22 August 2013

The latest half-year ABC circulation figures for music magazines made for depressing reading. Every title – with the exception of RWD – posted a significant drop in circulation. Some of those drops were severe: NME posted a 16.4% downturn year-on-year, Uncut was down 9.7% and Q down 8.7%. Mojo and Kerrang! looked like strong performers – relatively speaking – posting year-on-year circulation declines of ‘only’ 6.8% and 6% respectively. Whilst The Fly’s 35% year-on-year decline could be attributed to a great extent to problems at HMV, the trend is crystal clear: the music magazine sector is in crisis. 

We’ve been reporting declines in the circulation of music magazines for years now and nothing seems able to arrest the trend. One has to wonder how much longer even staple brands like Q or NME can survive in paid print form. There have been many glimmers of hope. When Q, for example, took on Andrew Harrison as Editor there was a feeling of resurgence, with the title rightly wining Magazine of the Year at the Record of the Day Awards last year. Harrison’s tenure in the Editor’s chair proved to be short lived however, with the corporate groups behind many music titles seeming to lose their nerve and direction about what to do with regards to the ongoing crisis. Only this week Bauer Media Publisher Rimi Atwal left the company as a result of a “strategic review of the London lifestyle publishing structure", leaving Q, Mojo and Kerrang!, with yet another new leader at the helm in David Bostock.

As if the figures weren’t depressing enough, we hear reliable claims that several publishers are ‘massaging’ their circulations to make them look better than they actually are via bulks (free issues given away at the dentist's etc) and overseas shipments registered as UK sales. The newspapers – once such an important part of RotD’s music coverage – have also abandoned music coverage to a large extent. The Times cut back its music coverage some time ago, The Guardian dropped its Film and Music supplement, Observer Music Monthly was canned some time ago, whilst The Independent On Sunday only recently announced its decision to axe its Critics section and RotD award-winning reviews from Simon Price along with it.

Music writing itself is not dead. It’s thriving on the internet: in online magazines, on blogs, even – dare we say it – in places like Facebook, where people can powerfully recommend and spread their new passions to an engaged audience. It seems however to have become something that any one can do, but very, very few can get paid for. In the same way that radio programmers increasingly turn to social media stats before making playlisting decisions, it seems the passion and gut feeling which used to lend a sense of excitement to music criticism has been lost in a world where every decision needs to be justified in terms of existing fanbase or potential monetisation. The danger and excitement seems to have gone, though who can afford much of either without a cash reserve to fall back on? We were therefore genuinely pleased to be able to report this week that Vice has proved its reporting and business model has real legs, attracting with its recent investment from Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox. Perhaps the future health of music criticism does lie in this kind of multi-platform brand. Many music titles have been trying to make this work for years already. Vice however seems to be the first real success story: thanks, we would judge, to its exemplary use of the exploding YouTube audience and by its talent for unifying stories from many different fields under one instantly-recognisable roof. 

RotD has had strong ties to music titles and journalists since we launched some ten years ago. Providing as we do a digest of music coverage – it seemed like a natural and complementary progression to launch the RotD Awards for Music Journalism and PR in 2003. This event has been rewarding and fun. Although we have never once made a profit from our awards, we have been gratified when winners added their RotD accolade to mastheads and email signatures. We’ve believed that our student writer prizes really did provide an excellent leg up to the best emerging talent. When PR guru Bernard Doherty said that his Outstanding Contribution award was his PR career highlight, we felt truly humbled. More than anything, the RotD Awards has been a great community event, an annual fixture where the UK’s top music journalists meet up, celebrate their art, bitch about the competition and generally have a great night. Alas, we’ve reached the point where we wonder if we can or should continue to celebrate a sector that’s visibly dying, at least in print terms. The kudos and reverence with which titles like Q or Mojo were treated with ten years ago is all but gone. The big publishers have all but lost interest in music journalism. We love quality music writing as much as ever, but when top writers and even publishers are now barely able to scratch a living from their work, what is there really to celebrate?  We’d appreciate your thoughts as to whether and indeed how we should continue with the RotD Awards in 2013.