LIKE an ageing rock star playing to ever diminishing audiences, there has been a degree of pathos to NME's decline. The New Musical Express, as it was called during its heyday, was for decades the most important music weekly in Britain. It was the champion of independent music, with the power to bestow hipness on whichever floppy-haired quartet it chose. At its height, it would regularly sell over a quarter of a million copies; now circulation has fallen to fewer than 15,000. So there was much lamentation, though little surprise, when the magazine’s publishers announced this week that it was to cease selling NME. Instead the magazine is to be converted it into a freesheet, to be thrust onto passers-by.
