Changing Face of the Magazine Industry

The magazine industry has had a drastic change over the years. Due to technology, people prefer to use apps and websites over a printed magazine copy. This clearly shows in this year’s statistics as NME, once a leading music brand has dropped down to selling less than 15,000 copies a week. Just like Q Magazine, who have dropped to an average of 46,096 copies sold a week after seeing a 21.8% down fall in profit year by year. However, Heyday, an online app and magazine based on music, art and poetry could proudly say that their mobile app has had a large number of success of 85% every year. This shows that the mobile applications are doing significantly better than the magazines, this is important because it shows technology is doing better than actual magazines.

This clearly proves that since the 90’s the preferences of people has changed, this is mainly because of the increased use of technology. It could be argued that digital technology has destroyed music magazines. This could be because people may argue that magazines tend to go out of date whereas websites and apps are always updated, also why would anyone go and spend money on something when they can find the same information on the internet for free? Alongside this, celebrities have more power through social media website and apps, therefore they don’t need music magazines to promote or cover things for them anymore. For example, a music artist, The Weeknd and dropped a new album which goes by the name of ‘Beauty Behind the Madness’’, The Weeknd promoted his new album a lot on Twitter, on which he has a fan base of 2.74m followers. Therefore people could get celebrity gossip or information about the celebrity straight from social media websites whereas before magazines would be used if people wanted to know about any new albums coming out or anything about the celebrity… before technology took over.

NME, one of the many famous music magazines has decided to drop from the price of £2.50 to free as they’re sales have decreased immensely. Music magazines are now having to work harder just for their audiences to show interest in them, for example:  NME are planning on adding more factors into their magazines now. So they will not just be focusing on music anymore but alongside that their magazines will include information on film, fashion, television, politic, gaming and technology. They are adding other factors to their once famous music magazine to attract readers and to advertise themselves, in attempt to make it back to the top, maybe?

In my opinion there has been a massive change in the magazine industry. It is quite clear that technology does the part of magazines in today’s day and age. However, I think just because people aren’t that interested in printed magazine copies it doesn’t necessary mean that the magazine company or the music brand has been destroyed. This is because magazines who have seen a decrease in their sales for the print copies have also seen a high increase in their applications and websites. Therefore blaming technology for the drop in sales or the interest of people in magazines wouldn’t be quite fair as the same magazines are doing really well on social media sites, online websites and apps. For example, NME came down to selling 15,000 copies a week which led them to make their magazine go free, however NME have a following 760,000 on Twitter along with 555,000 fans on Facebook and their website, www.nme.com has more than 5 million unique users. This shows that even though the magazine industry isn’t doing so well doesn’t mean that they have been forgotten or are demolished as they are still doing really well on social media sites/apps and online websites. 

- Ayat