I first started reading New Musical Express (NME) back around 1991. That was the year that Nevermind was released by Nirvana, and the NME were enthusing about Madchester. Yet I think it was Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub rather than Nevermind or Pills N Thrills & Bellyaches by the Happy Mondays that got Album of the Year.
In those days, NME was 90p. I read it every week. And occasionally I also read Melody Maker, it's competitor. Melody Maker kind of went bust, in some kind of merger with NME. NME immediately, in my view, thinned down. It is now so thin it only takes me 5 minutes to read it cover to cover. It's nice and glossy, but it costs 210p. Probably not a bad inflationary rise, but there is hardly any content.
I have read it religiously for 16 years. I cancelled by subscription last year but still bought it. Now I have subscribed online, through an American site www.zinio.com. It's about a quarter of the price and it gets emailed to me every week. I don;t get the free CDs but they were a bit of a pain anyway and not as good as they used to be when there were five quality songs on a tape.
The trouble is, I can't read a digital NME on the train. So I tend to file it on my computer for later reading and often I don't. But at least it isn't taking up space.
A few years ago I started reading Q. Much better value I think (it's about 4 to 5 quid) and is stuffed full of things. Not so with-it, admittedly. But it does have some new music in there. Yes it's a but old man but I am 32 after all, not 15.
What I really want, though, is a decent website where you can easily listen to music samples of what is being reviewed. Podcasts are useful, but I don't necessarily want an hourlong session with music playing in a line. With the internet it would be useful to subscribe to a magazine and be able to read reviews and have excerpts playing whilst you are browsing the reviews.
There must be a website that does that. Q has a podcast, but you cannot read reviews online to my knowledge. I am not overly keen on the NME website but it does have a media player. And whilst with the wb you can update it daily so that there is all new content, in a way I would be happier being emailed once a month saying that the site has changed. Else you lose track of stuff.
Perhaps I should build this site into my perfect music website cum magazine cum podcast thing. But then that would mean buying a whole bunch of albums that I don't like just so that I can review them. Hmmm. Maybe one day I'll get there.
If anyone knows any decent website, let me know. I am aware of last.fm or whatever and similar things but they just get you listenging to the music - there are no proper reviews on them.
Try Last FM. It also builds up interesting profiles of the music you are listening too. Lets you listen to most of the tracks online. And lets other people listen to your tracks. I think, I mainly use it see my my music profile.
You can also use I Like . I don’t use it so you might have to do some digging on it.
Yeah, iWas told about iLike a couple of days ago. iWill check it out and see what iThink. You set me up with last.fm but I think it had trouble processing my 48,000 iTunes tracks and it froze.
Last.fm only processes tracks you listen to. So the amount of tracks you have is irrelevant.
Pandora is pretty interesting too.