Music Magazines Past and Present

By Eloise Barrett

It is hard to say if the amount of music magazines has decreased from the 1970/80/90s. From my experience, me living now and working in a newsagents, I walk into work every week and I am surrounded by magazines for 5 hours and where I work there isn’t many music magazines to choose from, whereas if you walk into your local supermarket there will definitely be more music magazines there as it is a bigger shop. In total today there is 168 music magazines and counting, this includes online and real mags.

E.g. online magazine (also is a real magazine)

E.g. real magazine (also has a website)

NME magazine was published in 1952 as a music newspaper and turned into a music magazine format during the 1980’s and 1990’s, changing from newsprint in 1998. In the 1970s it was the best selling British newspaper and it is still being published to this day. Smash Hits magazine ran from 1978 to 2006. The magazine was at its peak in the 1980s but was overtaken by Top of the Pops in the 1990s. In July 2009 a one off issue of the magazine was published as a tribute to Michael Jackson. More one off specials released were November 2009 featuring Take That and December 2010 featuring Lady Gaga.

Kerrang is another music magazine that was published over 20+ years ago (was published 36 years ago) and is still going strong today. It was published in 1981 and became the best-selling British music newspaper in the early 2000’s.

1st issue of Kerrang

Kerrang 18 years ago Kerrang 2017