NME Magazine

NME is a weekly magazine and tend to focus more on music bands, DVD’s, events, tours, fashion, latest competition and latest camera. NME is renowned for its ‘voice of youth’ in the 70’s and 80’s. Music included is mainly rock and pop whilst it provides a strong insight to in and out of the indie music industry as well as quick review of gigs across the UK. It raises the bar with its passion for both current and old school sounds, creating an insistent love affair for ‘genuine’ music fans fanatic.

The adverts seem to take up the majority of space on a page, but throughout the magazine there is an equal amount of written text and pictures to engage with the readers and catch their attention. Reviews seems reasonably short and it’s ‘involved’ writing form and ‘tell it as it is philosophy connotate a style with a point and informative, which anyone would find difficult to argue with.

Are blackness and whiteness useful concepts in the study of popular music?

In other to understand where music originates from, it is very useful to study its background. It is difficult to consider some music as ‘black’ or ‘white’ because there are many factors to take into account before making a conclusive assumption. Concepts of blackness and whiteness are useful with understanding development of popular music. For example, blues music developed through slave trade; so understanding its background is very important to appreciate the musical sounds.

Music has evolved to a certain level where labels of white or black has to be disregard. E.g. Eminem is white but rap is categorised as black music and also, Phil Lynott is black but rock is seen as white. “Pop music has always depended upon the interaction between white and black traditions” (Hatch 1987)

Since music consumers are not always of the same race as the music performers. Concepts are put in place as guidelines to help address underlying issues within types of music and looking at its past.

Does the emergence of the digital download signal the end for the music industry?

Digital download does signal the end of the music industry to some certain extent as this can be seen from downturn sale of CD which as occurred from illegal download of music online and this can be support with Lessig identification of 4 purposes for downloading: to replace purchasing, (b) to sample then purchase, (c) to access otherwise unavailable content, and (d) to access content that is not copyrighted. Online sites such as Napster has made it easy to discover and download copyrighted music for free.
Although itunes music store reached its 10 billion download last year which shows that people are still willing to pay for their music and does mean that digital download doesn’t signal the of music industry. However reports have shown that music sales is declining in sales and I do believe this to be true through illegal download of music online.

Can popular music achieve genuine political change?

In some ways and to some extent, popular music can achieve genuine political change. Live aid music concert is one of the examples of music involved in an attempt to change world politics. Live 8 music concerts helped raised a substantial amount of money for third world countries where the government of developed countries have failed to eradicate developing countries debt, however this awareness reached billions of people and funds were raised world wide through the concerts and generated lots of money which means and shows that popular music helped achieved this.
Red Wedge, an independent organisation used popular music to promote the Labour party before the general election in1987. Overall popular music can achieve political change with some success, in 1984; Bob Geldof created Band Aid and used popular music to raise money and awareness for Africa where Government policies were failing.