Independent music magazine Plan B, currently a bi-monthly title, is going monthly and is stepping up its distribution in a bid to take on the mainstream titles in the music mag space.
The magazine's founder Everett True has told Press Gazette that he has been speaking to lots of young music fans in recent months while recruiting new editorial staff, and that that experience has furthered his belief there is room in the market for another big selling music title. He told the Gazette: "Our applicants seem to perceive a massive gap on music coverage in this country - that you've got NME and Q, which aren't really perceived as having much to do with music at all, which are just gossip magazines to shift papers and make their publishers rich. Obviously we're not as popular or as well-known as those other titles at the moment, but that's what we're aiming to be by going monthly."
Plan B is arguably more akin to the also independently owned The Word than the other mainstream music mags, but True reckons that the two titles are very much distinguished by their music policies. "The Word is put together by 50- and 60-year olds for other 50- and 60-year-olds, and I don't quite see what relevance that has to do with what we've got. That's not to slag the magazine off - they do what they do and that's fine but it's not the place to discover new bands, not even remotely."