But seriously, the NME has always been targeted at a specific demographic of which the likes of us are no longer part.

I've no doubt that when I was devouring the NME in my teens the previous generation were claiming it had gone downhill.

No. There are not corporate balls.

In longer form, it's a magazine. Circulations are falling. They need to maintain some kind of market share to stop the publisher pissing cash up a wall. Besides, the market you talk about long ago stopped taking any notice of the corporate shills writing for the NME; no, they've all moved to their own places online, where they can amuse themselves in the way you talk about. Music blogs, socail netowrking and the likes of Popbitch are just fine thanks.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

I wonder what the older generation would have thought about the sneering NME readers that you refer to. Probably nothing positive, and I'm not sure that sneering is something to be eulogised. Presuming that most of us are over, say, 25, if we like it as a magazine to read for ourselves, it's doing something wrong.

I think I'm right in saying that the readers voted for these awards. Clearly, then, this is what the readers want to see.

but I've glanced at it so I know roughly what it's like these days.

I don't think one can expect it to be as it was. Society and culture has changed so massively in the last 20 years that the old 'cynical, sneering, JCR-intellectual take on music' just wouldn't work anymore. Ideology has become a dirty word, UK politics moves ever more towards the centre, fewer bands than ever before define themselves by a 'manifesto' and the download kids listen to music in a different way from my generation.

NME has always reflected the times and it's current style and content continues to do so, for better or worse.

they need the advertising revenue. There's not much money coming out of the record companies - no surprise they suck up to the ones that support them.

I wonder what will happen to reviews, especially those where the release is scored or given stars. Who's going to dare to give Kasabian 2/10?

Circulation down 20% in the last year, so expect more cost cutting and a further decline in quality.

was a popular as old rock hacks would like to think. Sure people did enjoy the writing but they also bought NME MM etc because it was the only regular way to have contact with the world of music outside the records (scarce), gigs (in the provinces not a weekly occurrences) and the odd radio programme none mainstream music was invisible. Part of the reason most people bought the rocks mags is that they had a monopoly on information. Most of that info is now available on the web mostly for free.

at least a decade now, but the NME that I remember would have loved Kasabian and Muse. I don't think this is some kind of corporate ass-kiss. They always loved the more meat and potato music when it came to 'Indie'

Melody Maker was always the more interesting of the two, far more given to flights of fancy. For example 1992, whilst the Indie world (and the NME) was either championing Kingmaker or Grunge, Melody Maker were loving the up and coming Suede.

I can't be the only Word reader with an ad sales background that let out a muted pip of a cheer when I saw that nice double page, full colour display for the Audi A5 Sportback on page 2 and 3 of the March issue. Would I worry were The Word's gauleiters to rhapsodise about the A5 Sprotback's driveriffic qualities in a forthcoming podcast? Not one damned little bit as long as it kept the lights on in Word Towers. Like illuminatus said, the NME's readership might care less about advertiser-friendly editorial, but the paymasters love it...

...the likes of Burchill and Parsons in any case. I've never been particularly convinced that that generation of NME writers even liked or thought about music, per se, very much at all. It was all posturing and pretending they'd read difficult books.

I ate it up as a teenager, though - we all did. When I were a lad, the only way to get any news about records was NME and MM: the music glossies, with the exception of Select, were firmly aimed at the over-25s and bored me half to tears.

If anything, though, I do genuinely think that the NME is even worse now (shurely shome mishtake!) than it was before. I suppose the thing that gets most up my nose is the pretence that

a) punk (as the 5 year olds who write for the rag understand it, i.e. not really punk) was the most important thing ever to happen anywhere ever ever everevereverEVER; and

b) being "working class" (as the 5YOs understand it, i.e. not really working class) is the same as being musically important. Sure, they make exceptions, but did anyone see that sickening issue a couple of years ago where Nicky Wire, him out of Kasabian, and the Dark Crystal puppet out of The Enemy shared the cover? Banging on about being punks and working class this and working class that, and slating anyone who they saw as "middle class" for reasons passing understanding, with the full and sycophantic support of the 5YO writing it. I try not to get uppity about stuff, but the red mist PROPERLY descended. What a load of bollocks.

And the reason this gets up my nose so much is because everyone who works at NME is 24, did English Lit at Bristol shortly after getting an A and two Bs at a minor independent or grammar school, and lives perhaps the safest, most middle class life a 24 year old can expect to live. Not to mention that, if ever there was an antithesis to punk, today's NME is it, in a nutshell.

Also, there's bugger all wrong with being middle class, so there.

Sorry. What a terrible old rant. Upshot: the NME is probably worse than it was, but that's a bit like saying that syphillis is worse than chlamydia.

Yeah, baby, you're speaking my language. Petit bourgeois Irishman here and proud of it! Apologies for threadjack.

the N.M.E.knows it's demographic which it would seem does not include you,so why continue to read it.Just last week out of curiosity I bought a copy of Q a magazine I had not read for some years.I quickly realised that it was not for me any more.So I won't buy or read it again.Surely the reason we happy band of brothers and sisters read the WORD is because we find it speaks to us, who I imagine for the most part are well past our moshpit,slam dancing days.One day the current readership of the N.M.E. may be joining us in the Massive and no doubt in their turn complaining that the yoof of the day wouldn't know a good tune from a hole in their head.Time stands still for no man and nor should it.By the way,what do you think should have won?

The Buzzcocks box set Product was an eye-opener. The booklet managed to connect them to all sorts of hi-falutin ideas via Jon Savage's writing. It somehow managed to connect all sorts of disparate facts & opinions into a reverse-engineered manifesto. Previously I thought they were a decent band with some good tunes.