Website Review: NME
Written on October 20, 2010 – 6:18 pm | by emilysharrer
New Musical Express, or NME, is a British magazine music magazine that has been around since the 1950s and has a great online counterpart, NME.com. The site features a variety of content from breaking news stories, to featured videos, lists and photo galleries to a featured concert ticket section. The site is like a cross between Rolling Stone and Pitchfork; while it gives fair coverage to older bands or musicians’ initiatives it also lets readers know about upcoming bands and reviews albums by, and promotes, indie bands. This makes the site a good go-to to get all your music news in one lump sum.
Most news on the site is given to readers in tiny blips, and often you will find that NME gets their facts from other major publications, like Rolling Stone, which you might argue just makes NME a middle man when it comes to reporting music news. However, because it gives readers just tiny blips and not 500 words on a breaking news story, it lets readers process a lot of information quickly and get their need to know information and get out.
The concert tickets section of the site’s homepage is a cool edition and links you directly to buy tickets for your favorite acts. A major downside for readers that want a lot of information on a new album or information about a new band, is that the site does not contain any long feature articles like you get from rollingstone.com.
Here are some links to check out on the site:
A review of Kings of Leon’s new album, “Come Around Sundown”
A news blip about Keith Richards and Mick Jagger (you can see what I mean about getting information from other sites)
The site’s Cool List, which is a fun, reader-oriented feature on the site
Since the site is a big fan of the list format, and quick bite-sized content, I would pitch the following stories:
Currently, the site does the ten essential tracks of the week, which can be seen in nearly every music publication, so why not try having theme-oriented playlists in addition to change things up? I would like to start a column that features ten essential tracks depending on the week. For Halloween, I would do a Halloween playlist, for hispanic heritage month I could feature the best recent songs by hispanic artists, etc.
I would also be interested in penning a column called “The Week in Quotes,” which would include small blurbs about the most memorable or shocking things musicians or celebrities said that week.
Finally, I would like to join the list of commentary writers on the site and have blog posts featured on the site. Each week, I could write about a recent musical issue and include featured content like photo galleries, youtube videos and mp3s.
2 Responses to “Website Review: NME”
NME is great but I’m not sure what position it really serves in the modern music journalism market. It’s no longer the glowing promotion machine it was back in the day, but Mojo and Uncut pretty much corner the market on serious music analysis magazines. Still, it has too much of a great history to not give it credit.
So it’s an aggregator, rather than a reporter. That’s fine but Anthony is right — what role DOES it play these days? Some sloppy writing (“magazine music magazine”?) — 9/10