Photoshoot 2

 These are some of the more successful photographs from the 2nd time I picked up the camera. Generally I decided to use a blank background or a background which conveys some connotations of music (either through the keyboards or the music creation software, notable in 2 photos). 2 of the photographs fit into 2 of the main stereotypes of people in my chosen music genre(s). That of the laid back "stoner figure" with the long hair or the aggressive younger musician seen with his middle finger up. Stereotypes are typically a good way to connect with audiences members as they are instantly recognisable and help establish what type of a music a magazine will be about.

Live Photos

These are the live photos as mentioned in my introduction. These photos are of bands I like and were taken at various venues. The reason I am using live photos in my magazine is because it is conventional of typical hard rock and heavy metal mags (Metal Hammer, Kerrang!) and also provides ideas for articles and stories I could include within my mag.

Photoshoot 1

 Some of the photos I was planning to use.

Many of these photos are unusable due to being blurred, out of focus or just generally have a badly positioned model. Because of this I shall be doing a second photo shoot and I will possibly use more models including the current one (seen above). Another issue regarding these photos is their ill position on this blog post. This is due to the only inadequate positioning tool that blogger has available for use.
The general purpose of this photoshoot was to obtain photographs fit for use on my front cover and after some editing, proved successful. Some of the studio shots manage to convey an angry stereotypical rugged looking rocker who wears a leather jacket and has an extreme hairstyle. This is one of the 2 iconic and stereotypical male images of my magazine's music genres.The reasoning behind using such a stereotype is to make my magazine instantly recognisable of the music genres it is based on.

History Of NME

The paper's first issue was published on 7 March 1952 after the "Accordion Times and Musical Express" (from 4 October 1946) was bought by London music promoter Maurice Kinn, for the sum of £1,000, just 15 minutes before it was due to be officially closed. It was relaunched as the New Musical Express. It was initially published in a non-glossy tabloid format on standard newsprint. On 14 November 1952, taking its cue from the US magazine Billboard, it created the first UK Singles Chart, a list of the Top Twelve best-selling singles. The first of these was, in contrast to more recent charts, a top twelve sourced by the magazine itself from sales in regional stores around the UK. The first number one was "Here in My Heart" by Al Martino.

1960s

During the 1960s the paper championed the new British groups emerging at the time. The NME circulation peaked under Andy Gray, Editor 1957–1972, with a figure of 306,881 for the period from January to June The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were frequently featured on the front cover. These and other artists also appeared at the NME Poll Winners' Concert, an awards event that featured artists voted as most popular by the paper's readers. The concert also featured an awards ceremony where the poll winners would collect their awards. The NME Poll Winners' Concerts took place between 1959 and 1972. From 1964 onwards they were filmed, edited and then transmitted on British television a few weeks after they had taken place.
The latter part of the 1960s saw the paper chart the rise of psychedelia and the continued dominance of British groups of the time. During this period some sections of pop music began to be designated as Rock. The paper became engaged in a sometimes tense rivalry with its fellow weekly music paper Melody Maker; however, NME sales were healthy, with the paper selling as many as 200,000 issues per week, making it one of the UK's biggest sellers at the time.

1970s

By the early 1970s, NME had lost ground to Melody Maker, as its coverage of music had failed to keep pace with the development of rock music, particularly during the early years of psychedelia and progressive rock. In early 1972 the paper found itself on the verge of closure by its owners IPC (who had bought the paper from Kinn in 1963). According to Nick Kent (soon to play a prominent part in the paper's revival):

After sales had plummeted to 60,000 and a review of guitar instrumentalist Duane Eddy had been printed which began with the immortal words 'On this, his 35th album, we find Duane in as good as voice as ever,' the NME had been told to rethink its policies or die on the vine.

Adding to the irony of this review, in the 1960 NME Reader's Poll, Duane Eddy was the winner of the award for Number One World Musical Personality, taking first place ahead of consistent winner Elvis Presley.
Alan Smith was made editor and was given a short period of time by IPC to turn things around quickly or face closure. As a result the paper's coverage changed radically from an uncritical and rather reverential showbiz-oriented paper to something intended to be smarter, hipper, more cynical and funnier than any mainstream British music paper had previously been (an approach influenced mainly by writers such as Tom Wolfe and Lester Bangs). To achieve this, Smith and his assistant editor Nick Logan raided the underground press for its best writers, such as Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent, recruited other writers such as Tony Tyler, Ian MacDonald and Californian Danny Holloway. By the time Smith handed the editor's chair to Logan in mid-1973, the paper was selling nearly 300,000 copies per week and was outstripping its other weekly rivals, Melody Maker, Disc, Record Mirror and Sounds^.
According to MacDonald:

I think all the other papers knew by 1974 that NME had become the best music paper in Britain. We had most of the best writers and photographers, the best layouts, that sense of style of humour and a feeling of real adventure. We also set out to beat Melody Maker on its strong suit: being the serious, responsible journal of record. We did Looking Back and Consumer Guide features that beat the competition out of sight, and we did this not just to surpass our rivals but because we reckoned that rock had finished its first wind around 1969/70 and deserved to be treated as history, as a canon of work. We wanted to see where we'd got to, sort out this huge amount of stuff that had poured out since the mid '60s. Everyone on the paper was into this.

Led Zeppelin topped the "NME Pop Poll" for three consecutive years (1974–76) under the category of the best "Vocal Group".
In 1976, NME lambasted German pioneer electronic band Kraftwerk with this title: This is what your fathers fought to save you from.... The article said that the "electronic melodies flowed as slowly as a piece of garbage floating down the polluted Rhine". The year 1976 also saw punk rock arrive on what some people perceived to be a stagnant music scene. The NME gave the Sex Pistols their first music-press coverage in a live review of their performance at the Marquee in February that year, but overall they were slow to cover this new phenomenon in comparison to Sounds and Melody Maker, where Jonh Ingham and Caroline Coon respectively were early champions of punk. Although articles by the likes of Mick Farren (whose article "The Titanic Sails at Dawn" called for a new street-led rock movement in response to stadium rock) were published by the NME that summer, it was felt that younger writing was needed to credibly cover the emerging punk movement, and the paper advertised for a pair of "hip young gunslingers" to join their editorial staff. This resulted in the recruitment of Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill. The pair rapidly became champions of the Punk scene and created a new tone for the paper. Parsons' time at NME is reflected in his 2005 novel Stories We Could Tell, about the misadventures of three young music-paper journalists on the night of 16 August 1977, the night Elvis Presley died.

 

 

In 1978 Logan moved on, and his deputy Neil Spencer was made editor. One of his earliest tasks was to oversee a redesign of the paper by Barney Bubbles, which included the logo still used on the paper's masthead today (albeit in a modified form) – this made its first appearance towards the end of 1978. Spencer's time as editor also coincided with the emergence of Post-Punk acts such as Joy Division and Gang of Four. This development was reflected in the writing of Ian Penman and Paul Morley. Danny Baker, who began as an NME writer around this time, had a more straightforward and populist style.
The paper also became more openly political during the time of Punk. Its cover would sometimes feature youth-oriented issues rather than a musical act. The paper took an editorial stance against political parties like the National Front. With the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 the paper took a broadly socialist stance for much of the following decade.

1980s

In 1981 the NME released the influential C81 cassette-tape album in conjunction with Rough Trade Records, available to readers by mail order at a low price. The tape featured a number of then up-and-coming bands, including Aztec Camera, Orange Juice, Linx and Scritti Politti, as well as a number of more established artists such as Robert Wyatt, Pere Ubu, the Buzzcocks and Ian Dury. A second tape, C86, was released in 1986.
The NME responded to the Thatcher era by espousing socialism through movements such as Red Wedge. In the week of the 1987 election, the paper featured an interview with the leader of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, who appeared on the paper's cover. He had appeared on the cover once two years before, in April 1985.
Writers at this time included Mat Snow, Barney Hoskyns, Paolo Hewitt, Danny Kelly, Chris Bohn (known in his later years at the paper as 'Biba Kopf'), Steven Wells and David Quantick.
However sales were dropping, and by the mid-1980s, NME had hit a rough patch and was in danger of closing. During this period (now under the editorship of Ian Pye, who replaced Neil Spencer in 1985), they were split between those who wanted to write about hip hop, a genre that was relatively new to the UK, and those who wanted to stick to rock music. Sales were apparently lower when photos of hip hop artists appeared on the front and this led to the paper suffering as the lack of direction became even more apparent to readers. A number of features entirely unrelated to music appeared on the cover in this era, including a piece by William Leith on computer crime and articles by Stuart Cosgrove on such subjects as the politics of sport and the presence of American troops in Britain, with Elvis Presley appearing on the cover not for musical reasons but as a political symbol.
The NME was generally thought to be rudderless at this time, with staff pulling simultaneously in a number of directions in what came to be known as the "hip-hop wars". It was haemorrhaging readers who were deserting NME in favour of Nick Logan's two creations The Face and Smash Hits. This was brought to a head when the paper was about to publish a poster of an insert contained in the Dead Kennedys' album Frankenchrist. The insert was a painting by H.R. Giger called Penis Landscape, then a subject of an obscenity lawsuit in the US. In the summer and autumn of 1987, three senior editorial staff were sacked, including Pye, media editor Stuart Cosgrove and art editor Joe Ewart. Former Sounds editor Alan Lewis was brought in to rescue the paper, mirroring Alan Smith's revival a decade and a half before.
Some commented at this time that the NME had become less intellectual in its writing style and less inventive musically. Initially, NME writers themselves were ill at ease with the new regime, with most signing a letter of no confidence in Alan Lewis shortly after he took over. However, this new direction for the NME proved to be a commercial success and the paper brought in new writers such as Andrew Collins, Stuart Maconie, Mary Anne Hobbs and Steve Lamacq to give it a stronger identity and sense of direction, although Mark Sinker left in 1988 after the paper refused to publish a negative review he wrote of U2's Rattle and Hum. Initially many of the bands on the C86 tape were championed as well as the rise of Gothic rock bands but new bands such as the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses were coming out of Manchester. One scene over these years was Acid House which spawned "Madchester" which helped give the paper a new lease of life. By the end of the decade, Danny Kelly had replaced Alan Lewis as editor.

1990s

NME started 1990 in the thick of the Madchester scene, covering the new British indie bands and shoegazers.
By the end of 1990, the Madchester scene was dying off, and NME had started to report on new bands coming from the US, mainly from Seattle. These bands would form a new movement called Grunge and by far the most popular bands were Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The NME took to Grunge very slowly ("Sounds" was the first British music paper to write about grunge with John Robb being the first person to interview Nirvana. Melody Maker was more enthusiastic early on, largely through the efforts of Everett True, who had previously written for NME under the name "The Legend!"). For the most part, NME only became interested in grunge after Nevermind became popular. Although it still supported new British bands, the paper was dominated by American bands, as was the music scene in general.
Although the period from 1991 to 1993 was dominated by American bands like Nirvana, British bands were not ignored. The NME still covered the Indie scene and was involved with a war of words with a new band called Manic Street Preachers who were criticising the NME for what they saw as an elitist view of bands they would champion. This came to a head in 1991 when during an interview with Steve Lamacq, Richey Edwards would confirm the band's position by carving "4real" into his arm with a razor blade.
By 1992, the Madchester scene had died and along with The Manics, some new British bands were beginning to appear. Suede were quickly hailed by the paper as an alternative to the heavy grunge sound and hailed as the start of a new British music scene. Grunge however was still the dominant force, but the rise of new British bands would become something the paper would focus on more and more.
In 1992, the NME also had a very public dispute with its former hero Morrissey due to allegations that he had used racist lyrics and imagery. This erupted after a concert at Finsbury Park where Morrissey was seen to drape himself in a Union Flag. The series of articles which followed in the next edition of NME soured Morrissey's relationship with the paper and this led to Morrissey's not speaking to the paper again for over a decade. When Morrissey did eventually speak to the NME in 2003, he made it clear it was only because the three writers concerned had long since left.
Later in 1992, Steve Sutherland, previously assistant editor of Melody Maker, was brought in as the NME's editor to replace Danny Kelly. Andrew Collins, Stuart Maconie, Steve Lamacq and Mary Anne Hobbs all left the NME in protest, and moved to Select; Collins, Maconie and Lamacq would all also write for Q, while Lamacq would join Melody Maker in 1997. Kelly, Collins, Maconie, Lamacq and Hobbs would all subsequently become prominent broadcasters with BBC Radio 1 as it reinvented itself under Matthew Bannister.
In April 1994 Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was found dead, a story which affected not only his fans and readers of the NME, but would see a massive change in British music. Grunge was about to be replaced by Britpop, a new form of music influenced by British music of the 1960s and British culture. The term was coined by NME after the band Blur released their album Parklife in the same month of Cobain's death. Britpop began to fill the musical and cultural void left after Cobain's death, and with Blur's success and the rise of a new group from Manchester called Oasis Britpop would continue to explode for the rest of 1994. By the end of the year Blur and Oasis were the two biggest bands in the UK and sales of the NME were increasing thanks to the Britpop effect. In 1995 NME covered many of these new bands, and many of the bands played the NME Stage at that year's Glastonbury Festival where the paper had been sponsoring the second stage at the festival since 1993. This would be their last year sponsoring the stage; subsequently the stage would be known as the 'Other Stage'.
In August 1995 Blur and Oasis planned to release singles on the same day in a mass of media publicity. Steve Sutherland put the story on the front page of the paper. He was criticised for playing up the duel between the bands. Blur won the 'race' for the top of the charts, and the resulting fallout from the publicity led to the paper enjoying increased sales during the 1990s as Britpop became the dominant musical genre. After this peak the paper experienced a slow decline as Britpop burned itself out fairly rapidly over the next few years. This left the paper directionless again, and attempts to embrace the rise of DJ culture in the late 1990s only led to the paper being criticised for not supporting rock or indie music. The paper did attempt to return to its highly politicised 1980s incarnation by running a cover story in March 1998 condemning Tony Blair, who had previously associated himself with Britpop bands such as Oasis, and this received a certain level of attention in the wider media, but was generally not seen as coherent or well-argued.
Sutherland did attempt to cover newer bands but one cover feature on Godspeed You! Black Emperor in 1999 saw the paper dip to a sales low, and Sutherland later stated in his weekly editorial that he regretted putting them on the cover. For many this was seen as an affront to the principles of the paper and sales reached a low point at the turn of the millennium.

2000s

From the issue of 21 March 1998, the paper is no longer printed on newsprint, and more recently it has shifted to tabloid size with full, glossy, colour covers.
In 2000 Steve Sutherland left to become Brand Director of the NME, replaced as editor by 26-year-old Melody Maker writer Ben Knowles. In the same year Melody Maker officially merged with the NME, and many speculated the NME would be next to close, as the weekly music-magazine market was shrinking - the monthly magazine Select, which had thrived especially during Britpop, was closed down within a week of Melody Maker. In the early 2000s the NME also attempted somewhat to broaden its coverage again, running cover stories on hip-hop acts such as Jay-Z and Missy Elliott, electronic music pioneer Aphex Twin, Popstars winners Hear'say and R&B groups like Destiny's Child, but as in the 1980s these proved unpopular with much of the paper's readership, and were soon dropped. In 2001 the NME reasserted its position as an influence in new music and helped to introduce bands including The Strokes, The Vines, and The White Stripes.
In 2002 Conor McNicholas was appointed editor. With a new wave of photographers including Dean Chalkley, Andrew Kendall, James Looker and Pieter Van Hattem, and a high turnover of young writers. It focused on new British bands such as The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party and the Kaiser Chiefs who emerged as "indie music" continued to grow in commercial success. Later, Arctic Monkeys became the standard-bearers of the post-Libertines crop of indie bands, being both successfully championed by the NME and receiving widespread commercial and critical success.
In December 2005 accusations were made that the NME end-of-year poll had been edited for commercial and political reasons. These criticisms were rebutted by McNicholas, who claimed that webzine Londonist.com had got hold of an early draft of the poll.
In October 2006 NME launched an Irish version of the magazine called NME Ireland. This coincided with the launch of Club NME in Dublin. Dublin-based band Humanzi were the first to appear on the cover of NME Ireland. Poor sales in the Republic of Ireland resulted from competition from market leader Hot Press and free music magazines Analogue Magazine, Mongrel Magazine and State Magazine. This resulted in the magazine's demise in November 2006.
After the 2008 NME Award nominations, Caroline Sullivan of The Guardian criticised the magazine's lack of diversity, saying:

"NME bands" fall within very narrow parameters. In the 80s, the paper prided itself on its coverage of hip hop, R&B and the emerging dance scene which it took seriously and featured prominently – alongside the usual Peel-endorsed indie fare. Now, though, its range of approved bands has dramatically shrunk to a strand embodied by the [Arctic] Monkeys, Babyshambles and Muse – bands who you don't need specialist knowledge to write about and who are just "indie" enough to make readers feel they're part of a club. Like everything else in publishing, this particular direction must be in response to reader demand, but it doesn't half make for a self-limiting magazine.

In May 2008 the magazine received a redesign, aimed at an older readership with a less poppy, more authoritative tone. The first issue of the redesign featured a free seven-inch Coldplay vinyl single. Circulation of the magazine has fallen continuously since 2003. In the second half of 2011, the magazine's circulation was 23,924, 66% down on a 2003 figure of 72,442.

History of Kerrang!

Kerrang! commenced publication on 6 June 1981 and was edited by Geoff Barton, initially as a one-time supplement in the Sounds newspaper, which focused on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal phenomenon and on the rise of other hard rock acts. Angus Young of AC/DC appeared on Kerrang!'s first cover. Launched as a monthly magazine, Kerrang! began to appear on a fortnightly basis later, and in 1987 it went weekly. The original owner was United Newspapers who then sold it to EMAP in 1991.

During the 1980s and early 1990s the magazine placed many thrash and glam metal acts on the cover (like Mötley Crüe, Slayer, Bon Jovi, Metallica, Poison, and Venom) but later discarded them when grunge acts such as Nirvana rose to fame. Readers often criticise the magazine for repeating this process every time a new musical trend becomes popular.

Kerrang!'s popularity rose again with the hiring of editor Paul Rees circa 2000 when the nu metal genre, featuring bands like Limp Bizkit and Slipknot were becoming more popular. Rees went on to edit Q magazine and Ashley Bird took over as editor from 2003 to 2005. However the magazine's sales went quickly into decline in 2003 and Paul Brannigan took over as editor in May 2005.
The term "Thrash Metal" was first referred to in the music press by Kerrang journalist Malcolm Dome while making a reference to the Anthrax song "Metal Thrashing Mad" in issue number 62, page 8 published on 23 February 1984.


With the emergence of emo and metalcore, Kerrang! began to heavily feature this musical trend. However, the revamp was not welcomed by all readers and many complaints were received about Kerrang!'s sudden emphasis on emo and metalcore music. Brannigan took the magazine into its most commercially successful period with a record ever ABC for the title of 80,186 copies.
In 2008, EMAP sold its consumer magazine to current owner Bauer Media Group. Brannigan left Kerrang! in 2009 and Nichola Browne was appointed editor. She later stepped down in April 2011. Former NME features editor and GamesMaster deputy editor James McMahon was appointed as editor on 6 June 2011.

Metal Hammer History

Metal Hammer is a heavy metal based magazine on a monthly release schedule with it's first ever issue being released in 1986. The first concept of this magazine was instigated by Wilfried F. Rimensberger who later took the idea to another German man named Jürgen Wigginghaus. The multilingual idea behind Metal Hammer propelled the magazine into a monthly circulation of over 1 million, being published in 11 separate languages and largely outselling it's rival Kerrang! at the time of it's release.

Based in the United Kingdom, the magazine is published by a company called TeamRock, who also publish a magazine known as Classic Rock.

London-based Wilfried F. Rimensberger instigated the concept of MetalHammer magazine in 1983. At the time, he suggested to the infant Kerrang! magazine in London that they should publish a German version, but the editors of the time were not interested. Rimensberger took the idea to Jürgen Wigginghaus, publisher of German MusikSzene magazine where Rimensberger was Chief-Editor, and proposed the idea of a multi-lingual rock music publication. He also approached some of Europe's largest publishers such as Springer, Ringier and Bauer, but none were interested.
Eventually, Wigginghaus used the Dortmunder Rocknacht as a test ground for the publication in Germany and Rimensberger started the international English version Metalhammer UK from London. He developed the multilingual concept that propelled the magazine to a monthly circulation of over 1 million and, during its peak, published in 11 different languages across the globe - at the time largely outselling Kerrang!. Metalhammer had local language editions in countries such as Israel, Japan, Serbia, Spain, The Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Hungary, France. Metalhammer was also the first Western youth publication in the Soviet Union. Rimensberger made up the original and, at the time, unique concept of a heavy metal lifestyle magazine which was embedded in a network of Metalhammer branded multi-national radio shows, awards, tours, festivals, recordings, etc. This organization made the publication into the leading genre platform of the 80's - and the global leader in his segment of the publishing market.

Rimensberger, who started and owned Metalhammer UK Ltd and the registered rights of the name, later sold them to Wigginghaus whilst remaining in the background until the early Nineties as an adviser to Wigginghaus. Rimensberger was the promoter of the first Metalhammer Lorelei Festival, with leading metal acts such as Metallica, Motörhead and Venom. It was him who recommended Metallica to Peter Mensch (AC/DC) for management. Rimensberger also linked the name Metal Hammer with other successful brands such as the BBC (Friday Rock Show with Tommy Vance), MTV Metal Show with Bailey Brothers and Castle Donington Monsters of Rock Festival.
Harry Doherty, formerly of Melody Maker, became the launch editor of the English-language Metal Hammer, also producing the Metal Hammer TV Show on satellite television. He left to found the video magazine, Hard'n'Heavy, before being asked back by Wigginghaus to take over all the European issues of Metal Hammer and other associated magazines, such as Rock World. In association with Picture Music International, the video arm of EMI Records, Doherty also launched the Metal Hammer Video Magazine, in direct competition with his earlier creation, Hard'n'Heavy. Doherty left after a management dispute with Wigginghaus. Harry Doherty's original personal assistant Sue Powell went on to manage the London-based offices under Wilfried F. Rimensberger.
Rimensberger joined the start-up crew of MTV Europe as a consultant to the director of Network Development. He also became a co-producer of Tom Galley's Phenomena project, organising its worldwide record deal and linking it with some of the best rock musicians and singers. He co-produced with Tom Galley Dream Runner, Phenomena's best selling album which has become somewhat of a rock classic, uniting the best rock voices of the time on one studio album. Rimensberger also represented Stiletto Entertainment Los Angeles in Europe, produced Nina Corti at the Royal Albert Hall and various TV productions for Swiss, German and UK TV. He is the sourcing producer of Barry Manilow's movie project and Broadway-bound musical Harmony, the founder of The Children's Arts Academy and the producer of further cross-culture based projects such as 'Europa - The Woman and EuropeanIcons. In the 1990s, Wigginghaus lost control over the publication and, advised by Rimensberger, sold the German edition to Jürg Marquart, the publisher of Penthouse and Cosmopolitan magazines in Germany. Later, Wigginghaus had to sell the remaining UK publication to cover personal financial liabilities.
The issue of November 2011 marked the 25th anniversary of Metal Hammer captioned "25 years of keeping it heavy".

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