Despite all this potential new competition from bloggers and bedroom media stars, much of the traditional music media managed to keep hold of a sufficiently large audience to ensure sufficient revenues to keep afloat or, in some cases, to expand their operations. NME in particular capitalised on recent successful years to expand its operations and brand spin offs in 2006, most notably setting up news desks and an events programme in the US. Despite fluctuations in the ABC figures, most of the other main music titles also maintained a decent market share - Q, Kerrang!, Uncut, Word, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer, Rocksound, Touch, Hip Hop Connection and The Fly among them. And online, most music websites also stayed their ground - from the big guys like Yahoo Music and NME.com to independent players like Click Music, Gigwise and Drowned In Sound, the latter celebrating its sixth birthday this year.
But not all was good in the world of music media - which lost two of its most legendary pop brands in 2006 - Smash Hits in the print domain, Top Of The Pops in the TV world. EMAP closed down the former in February, while the BBC finally axed the longest running pop TV show in July, telling us that in the multi-music channel internet age their was no place for a weekly chart based live music show, though we all knew TOTP's demise was as much down to terrible producer, presenter and scheduling choices over the last few years as any change in the music and media world. Ironically, although Smash Hits ceased to exist in print, its spin off TV and radio stations remain, while as Top Of The Pops ceased to exist on the air, its magazine spin off survived.
2006 wasn't a good year for pop telly all round really. ITV's chart show CD:UK quietly disappeared off our screens before TOTP's demise, while my personal pop show of choice in 2005, Channel 4's Popworld, went all rubbish following the departure of presenters Simon Amstell and Miquita Oliver. Still, Amstell showed up as a replacement for Mark Lamaar on pop quiz show Never Mind The Buzzcocks, to all round joy here in the CMU office, while Channel 4 did their bit to ensure popular music still appeared on terrestrial TV by launching a new music programme more or less every week (or that's how it seemed). And of course music still played an important role in reality TV with even more music based talent shows on our screens in 2006 (Just The Two Of Us, Soapstar Superstar, X Factor, that Sound Of The Music thing) while music stars often dominated other celeb based reality shows - Preston boosting Ordinary Boys record sales through his stay in the Big Brother house, and pop stars Jason Donovan, Mylene Klass and Matt Willis gaining the most votes in the latest outing of I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. Oh, and elsewhere in TV world, Charlotte Church got her own chat show. She's sort of a pop star.