How the internet changed the music press

Internet and the Music Press

Famous music magazines such as the NME have always been centred on youth culture, young people are the biggest consumers of music magazines and this has always been the case. As social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter began to gain popularity in the early 2000’s young people starting using the internet more and more to connect with friends and groups from all over the world. These social media sites have become a big part of young people’s lives today, they have become a big part of popular culture and are used daily by everybody.

This has meant that less and less young people have been consuming hard copies of media, they have almost exclusively started to consume virtual electronic media through social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. This has meant that, for the music press, it is easier and more profitable to reach their target audience over the internet.

The NME launched its website in 1996 and became the world’s largest standalone music website where people could read articles written by NME journalists. In September 2015 the NME magazine became free and stopped selling abroad. It had become too costly to produce hard copies of the magazine as the NME’s target audience began to move exclusively to electronic media. So the NME decided to pour all of its resources into its website, here it can easily access its target audience with ease.