This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Media
Yet more decline in music mag circulation figures
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 15 August 2014
Somehow the Audit Bureau Of Circulation always seems to pick weeks when I’m really busy to pump out its regular magazine circulation figures, so much so I’m sometimes tempted to just dig out the report I wrote last time and re-run it, given the story is always the same: “the music mags all lost readers this last period”.
So, for example, Q is down 12.7% period-on-period to 46,096, Uncut is down 11% to 50,022, Kerrang! is down 6% to 33,024 and Mojo 4.8% to 70,667. Those stats don’t include the sale of ‘digital versions’ of the print mags, though even if those figures are included, sales are still down overall. (And these are the new stats by the way, I’m not just re-running February’s report).
The big headline of this set of ABCs, though, is that NME, with a further 21.3% decline this period compared to the last, has now dropped below 15,000 sales a week, though adding in digital sales of the mag takes it up to 15,830. But that’s still nothing compared to the music weekly’s glory years.
That said, as publisher IPC is always keen to stress, if you take all of the NME channels into account, including NME.com, the brand is now reaching a much bigger audience than it ever did in the pre-web days. Though you do sense that more editorial effort is still put into the flagging paper version.
Said IPC’s Jo Smalley: “NME’s overall brand reach is now 3.6 million, bigger than it has ever been, and this puts the print ABC story into its proper context”.
And commercially, Smalley added, ads in the print edition are just one part of a much bigger pie. She continued: “Amazing content partnerships with the likes of Amex and Nikon have been renewed for the third and fifth year in a row respectively, while major new partnerships with the likes of O2 have been secured during this period”.
