Según cuenta hoy The Times, el New Musical Express nunca ha vendido tan poco. La gente de dentro del superviviente semanario es pesimista respecto a su futuro debido a la dura competencia de otras publicaciones online y la inextencia de una escena de música udnerground que encesite de una plataforma como fue el NME, una publciación que la década pasada se comió a su competidor, el Melody Maker. Hoy por hoy están vendiendo 64.000 ejemplares cada semana, que a mí me parece una cantidad descomunal, pero para ellos es una gran crisis en sus 56 años de historia.
Since the invention of youth culture in the 1960s, each generation of British teenagers has grown up feeling that they owned NME and the bands inside. It is a fairly intense and obsessive relationship that tends to end with a messy split over musical differences around the age of 25. Former readers then become like embittered ex-spouses, forever recalling a rose-tinted Golden Age of rock journalism. Of course, the multimedia “brand platform” that constitutes today-s NME is far removed from the inky, prickly, wordy weekly that my generation grew up loving and loathing in the 1980s. The monochrome weekly magazine of my youth was mouthy, pretentious, political and packed with occult knowledge. It was like a deviant careers advisor, the hip young gunslingers of London calling to faraway towns. NME gave me my first and only real job. Stephen Dalton