ARTICLE 1: 'INTERVIEW WITH KERRANG!'
Kerrang! – the brand with attitude interview with stuart williams, publishing director of kerrang!
Stuart Williams is
the Publishing Director of Q, Mojo and Kerrang! magazines. Together these three
titles comprise more than 65% of the UK music magazine market. Q is the biggest
music monthly in the UK and Europe, Mojo the second biggest and Kerrang! the
world’s biggest music weekly. Here he is interviewed by Stephen Hill about the
way Kerrang! has positioned itself as the leading rock brand.Kerrang! – the brand with attitude interview with stuart williams, publishing director of kerrang!
Popular music video
Studying popular music video is more problematic than other media texts. While you may approach the pop video with more intuitive understanding than many other media, turning that knowledge into a strategy for learning is more difficult. On the one hand, people like you have had your MTV since infancy and are sophisticated and well-informed viewers; on the other hand, although music video has recognisable conventions and a traceable history, its continual changes make it hard to analyse. There is life beyond ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but getting the balance right is not always easy. And as with most media forms, the most straightforward way of beginning to think about the popular music video is in relation to the key media concepts.
Stuart has worked as the Head of Marketing for Q, Mojo and Kerrang! for 18 months. In this team he drove the expansion of these brands into numerous new product areas, including the launch of Q and Kerrang! In 2003 he headed the team which won the license for the UK’s first major rock radio station, Kerrang! 105.2 in the West Midlands.
Somewhere in the centre of London, just off Oxford Street is Mappin House: emap HQ and home to a portfolio of magazine titles that includes Zoo, FHM, Empire and, until just before Christmas 2006, also included Bliss. It is the Brill Building of contemporary magazine publishing. On the fourth floor, presiding over the music titles, I met with Stuart Williams, publishing director of Q, Kerrang! and Mojo. We had previously bumped into each other as speakers at a conference organised by Chris Bruce (another MediaMag contributor!) sitting on a panel about the music press. Meeting him on his home turf, however, was a different prospect. ‘Off duty’ he comports himself like the grown-up editor of a student mag: affable and droll; passionate about music. Would this slightly bumbling giant now be transformed into the city slick suit of the popular imagination: the embodiment of emap corporate ideology?
As the lift door opened my fears were dispelled. Dressed in jeans and what looked like an oversized golf sweater (which he later confessed he’d stolen from his dad!) this was clearly the same Stuart I’d heard narrate his own personal road to Damascus story from teen pop to cool pop, peer pressure to mainstreaming. Anxious not to waste his time I was keen to get on with the interview. However, Stuart insisted I had a look around the three titles housed on that floor. Having spent countless hours analysing these titles for my own research I was somewhat unprepared for this ‘through the looking glass’ moment; it felt like I had been transported into an episode of Jim’ll Fix It – it was hard not to gush.
As we toured three fairly ordinary looking offices I was introduced to a stream of writers, editors and advertising staff. Stuart explained how they had had to divide the floor because of competing sound systems and I was reassured in the Mojo office to see desks collapsing under the weight of assorted rock biographies and encyclopaedia. Elsewhere framed cover shots and mounted gold disks gave clues to the fact that this suite of rooms is, in fact, the nerve centre of the music press in the UK. As we retreated to the calm of the ‘meeting room’ I felt distracted from the task at hand by thoughts of the rock luminaries that might have sat within these same four walls...
MM: Stuart, could you begin by describing your role at emap?
I am publishing director of Q, Mojo and Kerrang! magazines. I am currently care-taking Empire magazine, which is in-between publishers, and I also have a brand responsibility on Kerrang!. Kerrang! is an unusual case because its business exists in a large way over more than one medium, so I sit on a board of people who run the Kerrang! brand. But my role is as publisher. At emap 40% tend to come from ex-editorial positions, 40% from ex-advertising backgrounds and 20% from marketing. I happen to have come from marketing, and then I have also had editorial roles in the past. Ultimately it’s my job to run the music part of the emap business and to deliver a profit figure and to maintain healthy growing magazines. That’s my job.
MM: How would you define a Kerrang! reader versus a Q reader?
It’s all about your level of interest in music and how you participate in that interest. At the specialist niche end you have the Kerrangs! or the mixmags aimed at people for whom music is the most important thing in their life right now. It defines their life. It’s how they spend their money and how they spend their time. So you are feeding people a huge amount of information to help them engage in that process. Q is further out in that scale.
MM: Is music still as important to contemporary media audiences?
18 million people in the UK between 15 and 50 at some point in the month listen to music and enjoy listening to music; half those people are what we call indifferent, to whom music is wallpaper and they are not even remotely interested. Half that number again, three million people roughly, are casual listeners; people who would buy a Dido album or a Robbie Williams album and maybe if they are being a bit racy this month will buy a Razorlight album. The next level up is when you start getting into magazine territory are enthusiasts. We think there are about 1.7, 1.8 million of those in the UK. They are fans who have money burning a hole in their pocket and music is an important defining factor in their life. They may also do sport, they may also have a family, but music is something they think they know a little bit more about than their mates at the pub. That’s a Q reader. At the very top level there is half that number again. These are the Mojo and Kerrang! readers – what we call ‘savants’. Those people have a burning passion for music.
MM: If Smash Hits
was the ‘hero brand’ for emap that took it to the next level as a company in
the early 1980s, what are the hero brands now? Are they print-based?
From emap’s point of view Kerrang! is certainly a hero-brand. We have sold off or closed anything we don’t consider to be priorities. Right now our biggest, most lucrative and strongest brand is Kerrang! And yet we believe that Q and Mojo both have enormous potential for the future.
MM: Why do you think Kerrang! has been able to transform itself into this mainstream minority brand?
I think any brand has to know what its boundaries are: what it can do that nobody else can do. And the beauty of Kerrang! is that it’s had twenty years of trying to define itself in its own little way; twenty years of building a heartland and building a heart for the brand meant that after that period it knew exactly where its core was. And once you know what your core is you can go out and evangelise about it. We don’t think we have dramatically changed what Kerrang! does by taking it to new readers.
MM: When did Kerrang! come onto the radar for emap?
Well Kerrang! had been going for 19 years. It was launched in 1981 and for 19 years it served a heavy metal community and to some degree the classic rock community – and that’s got a very finite number in this country, about 40,000. But with any sort of music it is only as accessible as the number of access points. So when I was a kid I had two other friends out of 30 who were into rock music; all our other friends were into pop music or dance music or early hip-hop. The vast majority of people just listened to Radio 1, watched Top of the Pops on Thursdays and the Chart Show on Saturday. It was the only way you could access music in most places.
MM: Has the way people access music changed?
With the deregulation that happened in the early Noughties, particularly with the internet, so many more channels opened up and this has just made it easier to find this music. So when we had the opportunity to launch a TV station based on Kerrang! that was a big break. So the only people who heard about it for those first 19 years were people who read Kerrang! and suddenly with Kerrang! TV we had the opportunity to put the brand on the portable TV set in the kitchen watched by maybe three or four people in the family. So it may be that only 12-year-old Sam wanted to watch it – but in that three minutes he watched it, three more people in the house saw it and liked what they saw.
MM: So how do you protect the value of that brand? How do you stop it becoming devalued like a Che Guevara T-shirt?
It’s mostly intuitive. We don’t actually have a brand book, a template. If you go to Jack Daniels, if you go to Pepsi they will have written on a piece of paper ‘Jack Daniels will do this, it won’t do that’; it’s written in stone.
MM: Jack Daniels is a single product. emap has fingers in many pies and Kerrang! is a multi-platform brand.
Well, there are very few media brands which exist across different platforms successfully. CNN does it. BBC does it. But, they tend to be umbrella brands. We know who our core audience is: it’s partly intuitive but it is also because we have such a high level or interaction. Every week we get hundreds of letters and we now have 45,000 friends on MySpace. So literally we can think what shall we do with the posters next week in Kerrang!? Should it be My Chemical Romance or should it be Aiden? And the picture editor can go on MySpace and say, ‘Hey guys what should we do in Kerrang! next week?’ and you will get 20,000 responses.
MM: That’s very similar to the situation with the letters page at Smash Hits in the early 1980s.
Yes, except it’s immediate. You don’t have to wait for the post-bag. And it changes day by day. If you are absolutely sure who your core audience is and who you are talking to, it helps you get it right, but Kerrang! has always had these advantage that it is sheltering against the mainstream and it almost defines itself as much by what it doesn’t like as what it does like. How you protect it is by having a pretty small group of people who know what they are talking about.
MM: So is Kerrang! shaped by its audience or is its audience shaped by Kerrang!?
I wouldn’t be presumptuous enough to say that we control our audience but we certainly have an influence. Kerrang! is very much written by the fans for the fans so the tone of voice is supposed to be that of your average reader.
MM: What recommendations would you give to a prospective writer about the Kerrang! house style?
It’s celebratory. Compared to NME, which is defined by the five or six bands that it likes at any point in time and then slags off the rest, Kerrang! tends to ignore the stuff it doesn’t like and just be enormously enthusiastic, passionate and evangelical about the stuff that it does like. You never patronise your readers. You can debate something but you don’t slag off something you know people have come to the magazine to read about. In that age group people genuinely love these bands, they hero worship them; so for you to say ‘Panic at the Disco are rubbish they’re just kidding’ would be insulting to the readers. Yes they might be derivative, and yes they might sound like a band you might have read about ten years ago, but the advice is put yourself into mentality of a fan that genuinely loves this stuff and write it in a style that is going to sell it to people who don’t know about this stuff yet.
MM: How do you cope with fact that the youth of today has a much greater knowledge of popular music history than generations that have gone before?
From emap’s point of view Kerrang! is certainly a hero-brand. We have sold off or closed anything we don’t consider to be priorities. Right now our biggest, most lucrative and strongest brand is Kerrang! And yet we believe that Q and Mojo both have enormous potential for the future.
MM: Why do you think Kerrang! has been able to transform itself into this mainstream minority brand?
I think any brand has to know what its boundaries are: what it can do that nobody else can do. And the beauty of Kerrang! is that it’s had twenty years of trying to define itself in its own little way; twenty years of building a heartland and building a heart for the brand meant that after that period it knew exactly where its core was. And once you know what your core is you can go out and evangelise about it. We don’t think we have dramatically changed what Kerrang! does by taking it to new readers.
MM: When did Kerrang! come onto the radar for emap?
Well Kerrang! had been going for 19 years. It was launched in 1981 and for 19 years it served a heavy metal community and to some degree the classic rock community – and that’s got a very finite number in this country, about 40,000. But with any sort of music it is only as accessible as the number of access points. So when I was a kid I had two other friends out of 30 who were into rock music; all our other friends were into pop music or dance music or early hip-hop. The vast majority of people just listened to Radio 1, watched Top of the Pops on Thursdays and the Chart Show on Saturday. It was the only way you could access music in most places.
MM: Has the way people access music changed?
With the deregulation that happened in the early Noughties, particularly with the internet, so many more channels opened up and this has just made it easier to find this music. So when we had the opportunity to launch a TV station based on Kerrang! that was a big break. So the only people who heard about it for those first 19 years were people who read Kerrang! and suddenly with Kerrang! TV we had the opportunity to put the brand on the portable TV set in the kitchen watched by maybe three or four people in the family. So it may be that only 12-year-old Sam wanted to watch it – but in that three minutes he watched it, three more people in the house saw it and liked what they saw.
MM: So how do you protect the value of that brand? How do you stop it becoming devalued like a Che Guevara T-shirt?
It’s mostly intuitive. We don’t actually have a brand book, a template. If you go to Jack Daniels, if you go to Pepsi they will have written on a piece of paper ‘Jack Daniels will do this, it won’t do that’; it’s written in stone.
MM: Jack Daniels is a single product. emap has fingers in many pies and Kerrang! is a multi-platform brand.
Well, there are very few media brands which exist across different platforms successfully. CNN does it. BBC does it. But, they tend to be umbrella brands. We know who our core audience is: it’s partly intuitive but it is also because we have such a high level or interaction. Every week we get hundreds of letters and we now have 45,000 friends on MySpace. So literally we can think what shall we do with the posters next week in Kerrang!? Should it be My Chemical Romance or should it be Aiden? And the picture editor can go on MySpace and say, ‘Hey guys what should we do in Kerrang! next week?’ and you will get 20,000 responses.
MM: That’s very similar to the situation with the letters page at Smash Hits in the early 1980s.
Yes, except it’s immediate. You don’t have to wait for the post-bag. And it changes day by day. If you are absolutely sure who your core audience is and who you are talking to, it helps you get it right, but Kerrang! has always had these advantage that it is sheltering against the mainstream and it almost defines itself as much by what it doesn’t like as what it does like. How you protect it is by having a pretty small group of people who know what they are talking about.
MM: So is Kerrang! shaped by its audience or is its audience shaped by Kerrang!?
I wouldn’t be presumptuous enough to say that we control our audience but we certainly have an influence. Kerrang! is very much written by the fans for the fans so the tone of voice is supposed to be that of your average reader.
MM: What recommendations would you give to a prospective writer about the Kerrang! house style?
It’s celebratory. Compared to NME, which is defined by the five or six bands that it likes at any point in time and then slags off the rest, Kerrang! tends to ignore the stuff it doesn’t like and just be enormously enthusiastic, passionate and evangelical about the stuff that it does like. You never patronise your readers. You can debate something but you don’t slag off something you know people have come to the magazine to read about. In that age group people genuinely love these bands, they hero worship them; so for you to say ‘Panic at the Disco are rubbish they’re just kidding’ would be insulting to the readers. Yes they might be derivative, and yes they might sound like a band you might have read about ten years ago, but the advice is put yourself into mentality of a fan that genuinely loves this stuff and write it in a style that is going to sell it to people who don’t know about this stuff yet.
MM: How do you cope with fact that the youth of today has a much greater knowledge of popular music history than generations that have gone before?
I think that until recently Kerrang!’s role has been about
educating and informing and passing the knowledge on to the next generation.
Undoubtedly what you have found in the last 18 months to two years is that
everybody knows more about music. More people are consuming more music through
more media bases than ever and that means the general knowledge is very much
going up. So what we are moving to more is hosting a debate and every now and
then throwing in tit bits for people to discuss. You never want to be seen as
the know all.
MM: How has Kerrang!’s readership changed?
Other than Smash Hits, Kerrang! has always been the most female-biased magazine. At its most unbalanced it was 80:20 male:female readership. In the latest wave of research that we’ve had done, the female readers are, for the first time, slightly outweighing the male: 53/47. I put that partly down to Avril Lavigne from three or four years ago. That generation came into what was pop music with a rock aesthetic; with them maturing and still liking guitar music and the rock aesthetic they just wanted something a bit more hard-core which Kerrang! could provide.
MM: How has Kerrang!’s readership changed?
Other than Smash Hits, Kerrang! has always been the most female-biased magazine. At its most unbalanced it was 80:20 male:female readership. In the latest wave of research that we’ve had done, the female readers are, for the first time, slightly outweighing the male: 53/47. I put that partly down to Avril Lavigne from three or four years ago. That generation came into what was pop music with a rock aesthetic; with them maturing and still liking guitar music and the rock aesthetic they just wanted something a bit more hard-core which Kerrang! could provide.
MM: Do you think
there is something more celebratory about female audiences that makes them key
into a magazine like Smash Hits or
Kerrang!?
I think it’s all about hero worship and the rock press has
always been about worshipping people who live the lifestyle and can elucidate
exactly what you’re thinking, which is different to dance music. Dance music is
always about the experience of actually being out there doing it right now.
Wake up in the morning and move onto something new. Pop music is also a very
ephemeral thing. With rock music it’s about these people living the lifestyle.
The classic thing with male rock stardom is that girls want to f**k them and
guys want to be like them. Nothing’s changed there. I think the borders have
come down. There still aren’t many female rock stars so you can’t say that the
girls are coming in because there are more role models. Shirley Manson and
Courtney Love: they’re all from ten years ago. Teenage girls want something to
idolise and right now there are lots of pretty boy rock bands that they can
idolise. Three years ago it was Busted. Now it’s Panic at the Disco, Aiden...
MM: Will Q and
Kerrang! be here in 10 years time?
Absolutely, though they may not be in their existing form.
At the turn of the century one of the chief execs stood in front of the company
and said he could imagine a future in five years time in which Smash Hits no
longer existed as a magazine but continued to exist as a website. The guy was
lambasted and in fact resigned not long afterwards; and it’s come to pass.
You’ve got to ask what the brand does. It’s a horrible word, brand, but it sits
very badly with the music press; but Kerrang! champions a number of genres.
It’s the only brand out there that sees the link between Panic at the Disco and
Iron Maiden.
MM: Really what
you are talking about is a set of ideological values. A system of beliefs...
Absolutely. Whenever I touch the Q brand or interact with
Kerrang! in some way, I want to know, ‘How is it going to leave me? Am I going
to be turned onto music? Entertained? Is it going to save me money? Has it got
me access to something I wouldn’t otherwise have had access to?’ So that’s what
we see in terms of brand. I would say the Kerrang! brand is about championing
and feeding rock fans’ interest for music. You asked me earlier how do you
create a brand, and that’s something that’s transferable between different
media and it’s adaptable. So on paper that could mean posters, quizzes and
crosswords, features and yet, as a radio station, that could mean wall-to-wall
music, and on TV that could mean videos. That’s a brand. It’s feeding out
constituency music.
MM: So do you
research the brand?
Oh continually: the official research influences our
decisions. Only 30 to 40% of decisions are based on research. It informs our
debate and then we trust the people in charge of the business to make the
decision on it. Research is notorious for leading people down the wrong path.
We only ever do research on the audience really. The more you know about your
audience the more you can trust talented and creative people to come up with
products that will fit the audience.
MM: Is it a
taste-maker then, or does it just reflect the taste of your audience? The
danger is that it no longer means anything, and people don’t understand what
the brand is anymore. How do you protect against that?
I think actually the experience that Kerrang! has gone
through has only strengthened the brand. It has brought it to life. A music
brand which only exists on paper can seem quite subdued and recessive. The
beauty of new media is that you can play people the new music you want them to
here.
MM: So if you
think about magazines that have disappeared – Vox, Melody Maker, Select – is
that just bad business or is it a brand that doesn’t translate?
I think its different in each individual case. What emap
does is that wherever it exists it tries to have the number one or number two
brands in the market. In hard times numbers five, six, seven and eight will
drop out, but number one and two will always survive. Vox was just a poor
version of Q. Melody Maker towards the end had lost its differentiation, and
became number two to NME. Select latched onto one particular genre, which it
did beautifully for three years; and then as soon BritPop died Select died with
it. It tried to reinvent itself but it’s very very hard to re-invent a
magazine. Select tried to go from being a BritPop magazine to a new music
magazine and there wasn’t a gap in the market for any new music magazine. Music
brands have to maintain a distance from genres and they have to maintain
objectivity. They have to appeal to the sensibilities rather than the music.
For Kerrang! ‘attitude’ is the most important thing.
MM: So, finally,
what is the Kerrang! attitude?
We talk eternal truths a lot. The eternal truth of the
Kerrang! market is that there will always be a generation that wants to rebel
against its parents through the experience of aggressive loud rock music. Rock
music may ebb and flow within that but there will always be a market for that
so Kerrang! will always serve that market. The question I suppose then is will
there always be a Smash Hits! market, a bunch of kids who want to wear deeley
boppers and go and watch a pop band? The answer to that right now is no –
because that market hasn’t existed for two or three years.
(Stephen Hill is Head
of Media at the Burgate School and 6th Form Centre in Fordinbridge. He also
teaches at Bournemouth Media School and is doing a PhD on the music press.)
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 19.
ARTICLE 2: 'WHY I LOVE(D) SMASH HITS'
Why I love(d) Smash
Hits
Stephen Hill is Head of Media at The Burgate School and
Sixth Form. He has just completed a PhD on the music press: a topic that he now
loves to hate. Though Q was his first love, Smash Hits is now a guilty
pleasure. But not any old Smash Hits you understand…
I hate the music press. I will do anything to avoid reading
a music magazine. Instruction manuals, legal small print, even the side of
cereal packet have greater appeal than half an hour flicking through the pages
of Q or Mojo. However, it wasn’t always so. As a teenager in an age before
internet and digital television, the music press was about the most exciting
thing in my life, second only to the music it covered. A portal to a less
provincial existence, reading the music press fuelled fantasies of a more urban
realism: a nocturnal existence of night clubs, street-culture and the
underground music scene. As in Brave New World the spark I saw was, of course,
my own and the Nineties turned out be a fairly facile kind of utopia: the
counterculture sensibility in the music scene of previous eras didn’t really
translate into Post-Thatcher Britain, enraptured by the corporate sounds of U2
and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. However, six years researching the music press
has killed that intimate bond. Once it would have been my dream job to write
for the music press. Now it would be my worst nightmare.
In a sense my research has been revenge: revenge upon a
music press that duped me into believing the mythologies of rock, only to
debunk those legends in a corporatised version of popular music culture in the
Nineties. Asking me to name my favourite music magazine is therefore never
going to get a straightforward answer. Indeed, I have always found those sorts
of question impertinent. It’s like asking someone what sort of music they like:
the question is never value neutral, but loaded with implicit judgements of
taste and discernment. Exactly the kind of prejudice rehearsed in the music
press! However, If you’d asked me at the age of fifteen I would have probably
said Q. And, indeed, if I were to identify the magazine that has had the most
influence on me, then the EMAP title would certainly win.
Assimilating the sophisticated written style of Q gave me
the edge in English essays and framed my own understanding of popular music
history. The retrospective sensibility of Q suited my own dissident mindset: I
never bought into the zeitgeist spirit of NME or Melody Maker anyway. I knew
only too well from my parents that rock and roll predated their first meeting
in the Summer of Love. The halcyon days of Q, however, were soon marred by the
end-of-the-century anxiety of the late Nineties, as the project of
retrospection accelerated: the publication of endless lists and the death of
the bankable cover star both detracted from Q’s original template of balanced
consumer journalism. What makes a good music magazine is, however, very
subjective. There is a difference between personal preference and reasoned
judgement.
The talisman by which I would judge a music magazine today
is the extent to which it has shaped the cultural vanguard: the cutting edge of
what the music press means in any era. Melody Maker in the Thirties, NME in the
Fifties, Rolling Stone in the Sixties etc: at one time or another most of the
well-known titles can claim that crown. In this sense Kerrang! could be said to
be the most significant music magazine of the Noughties. As a specialist
magazine, the successful development of the title as a niche market,
multiplatform brand is a textbook example of the importance of identifying
defined communities of consumers to media institutions in the post-digital age.
Though the magazine is successful as a TV and radio station and its website
enjoys a high volume of traffic, it is the traditional values of the magazine
that ground its success: posters for the bedroom wall and interviews from a
subcultural music scene. That said, I find the magazine quite bland and
formulaic; but then I’m not in its target audience!
The streamlining of the music press is of course a function
of the digital revolution. From the iPod to YouTube media audiences are
consuming ever more specialist media diets. Bandstand media brands have found
it increasingly difficult to compete with the internet and download technology:
testimony to this fragmentation of the market is the closure in 2006 of the
magazine Smash Hits followed by the BBC television show Top of the Pops. It’s
possible that in the future there may again be interest in a magazine,
programme or website which provides a digest of these increasingly eclectic
sub-cultural groups. And I think that such a magazine could learn a great deal
from the early Smash Hits.
Why I love(d) Smash
Hits
In the end I would nominate Smash Hits, EMAP’s first venture
into publishing music magazines, as my favourite. Not the adolescent schoolgirl
fodder of the popular imagination but its early incarnation at the end of the
Seventies.
The Smash Hits of 1978 to 1980 was a wonderful thing.
Received thinking is that the magazine was ideologically opposed to the old
style ‘inkies’ like the NME and Melody Maker. However, Smash Hits was actually
the brainchild of NME editor Nick Logan: the same Nick Logan who went on to
launch The Face and who, at NME, was responsible for hiring both Julie Burchill
and Tony Parsons, two icons of music journalism. Quite rightly the magazine is
fêted for its use of colour and, indeed, Smash Hits reacquainted pop with what
Simon Frith calls its ‘televisual sensibility’. It could be argued, for
example, that in some sense the magazine created a climate ripe for the
explosion of music video in the early Eighties. What is often over-looked,
however, is the diversity of music it covered; from Punk to Disco, Reggae to
New Wave, Smash Hits did not make value judgements about pop music genres.
Neither did Smash Hits patronise its audience. The editorial assumed high
levels of literacy and cultural capital on the part of its readers. However,
what makes Smash Hits from this era so very special is that the music it
covered was so exciting. 1979 is the commercial high point of singles sales in
the UK to date, and the mainstream of pop was in a period of unprecedented
diversity. Reconfigured by the deconstructive sensibility of Punk, even Cliff
Richard singles resonated in the collision of guitar-based rock and dance floor
rhythms. Though Smash Hits is synonymous with the success of New Pop (Duran
Duran, Spandau Ballet etc) the achievements of those artists featured on the
cover of Smash Hits between 1978 and 1980 far outstrips their video pop
forebears in terms of both sales and musical innovation: The Jam, Roxy Music,
Blondie, Madness, The Police, Donna Summer etc all regularly featured in the
Top Ten singles chart and on the cover of Smash Hits.
In choosing my favourite music magazine I have opted for one
launched in the year of my birth and from a period that stretches little
further than my second birthday; yet this is less peculiar than it at might
first appear. Pop culture is characterised by the continual rehabilitation and
recycling of its archives re-releases, remixes and cover versions have long
since resurrected aspects of pop past onto the landscape of pop present. And,
more recently the proliferation of downloads and web 2.0 sites like YouTube and
MySpace have acquainted contemporary audiences with all aspects of the pop
past. Music magazines are no exception to this rule. While in the past it was
possible to purchase memorabilia from record fairs and classified ads, the
internet makes that archive more accessible than a trip to the newsagents.
While friends may mock, my purchase of Smash Hits from eBay then is extremely
contemporary. And what I have uncovered has turned out to be far more modern
than anything on offer in the current crop of mags: a music press unbeleaguered
by niche markets and multiplatform brands; a music press that rejoiced in the
diversity and creativity of the musical mainstream. And, what more, even in
2008, is there to be asked of the music press than that? I love Smash Hits!
ARTICLE 3: 'SMASHED HITS'
Smashed hits
So farewell then, Smash Hits. The mag that thrilled
generations of teens is no more. Sara Mills analyses what went wrong.
Smash Hits was one of
the biggest music magazines of the last century. Started in 1978, it came out
every fortnight, to gasps of delight from teenagers all across Britain, eager
to get hold of the latest pull-out posters of their favourite star and to read
the lyrics of the number one song. But in February 2006, Smash Hits published
its last ever print magazine. Why did a product that was once so successful
lose its popularity to the extent that it was closed down? Was it death by
neglect, ignored by the new generation of teenagers, or was it slowly eaten
alive by the ever-hungry, ever-expanding internet? It could have been a
terminal lack of cool that killed it, or perhaps it was just a casualty in
another war: a victim of the lobby against junk food advertising.
But whatever the cause, teenagers stopped buying Smash Hits,
no longer wanting their fortnightly fix of song lyrics, posters of pop’s latest
pin-ups and the latest poptastic news. But interest in music is as strong as
ever: Radio 1 plays to huge audiences, bands have sellout tours and MTV has
spawned a whole genre of music TV, and other print magazines have ridden the
storm: the NME, Kerrang! mixmag and Mojo all still sell well. So why not Smash
Hits ?
Smash Hits’ circulation started falling in the early 90s. It
just didn’t appeal to its core audience enough any more. Perhaps it stopped
fulfilling their needs. Thinking about it in terms of Blumler and Katz’s Uses
and Gratifications, or Four Needs Theory may help to unpick the problem.
A key function of music magazines is to inform their
audience. This fits into Blumler and Katz’s idea of surveillance, with the
music magazine providing information and insight that the teen just can’t get
anywhere else. Once, that was true. There was nowhere else to find out what
Kylie’s latest hairstyle was, or if she was really going outwith Jason Donovan.
And certainly the song lyrics were invaluable for any teenager who wanted to
learn them and sing along in the mirror. The listings pages and reviews of
singles and albums were crucial.
Over the years, the content of Smash Hits remained the same:
the same information, the same opportunity to satisfy the need for
surveillance, but overtaking it on the outside lane came something much faster:
the internet. It was like a Porsche overtaking a tractor. Nowadays, you don’t
have to wait two weeks to find out about music – with the advent of broadband,
even 2 seconds can seem an unreasonably long time. There’s more information and
interviews and reviews about music than we could ever have dreamed of 20 years
ago, and it’s all available in your bedroom, and, most importantly, instantly.
So while Smash Hits did still satisfy the need for information, perhaps it just
did so slowly and so badly that no-one was interested anymore.
Music is sometimes seen as more important than anything to
teenagers as a way of defining their style and image. Whether you listen to
Marilyn Manson or to Girls Aloud says a huge amount about what kind of person
you see yourself as. In some cases, liking Eminen or Muse can almost amount to
a tribal identity, signalling membership of a certain sub-culture. So what you
read and buy in relation to music also reflects your sense of personal
identity, another of Blumler and Katz’s four needs. If you buy Kerrang! you’re
signalling that you are a different kind of person from those who buy mixmag.
The image of the stars and musicians, the mode of address and advertising, are
all geared to the niche audience of the magazine. Readers of mixmag are
bombarded with images of suntanned girls, cheap flights and big party scenes,
all focusing around the idea of the reader being someone who goes to Ibiza and
dances all night. Even if you’ve never been further away than Southend or
Skegness, it doesn’t matter. You aspire to go to Ibiza – you are the kind of
person who might, who could, and who is just as cool as the people who actually
do go there.
But what if you read Smash Hits? Who are you then? Well, you
are probably a 12-year-old girl. And not many of us aspire to be 12-year-old
girls. Especially not 13-year-old girls, and extra especially not boys. So who
wants to be a 12 year old girl? Mainly, 11-year-old girls. In terms of
aspirational reflections of personal identity, Smash Hits had a very narrow
group to aim at. Once it targeted both boys and girls. Back in the early days,
it was a credible music magazine, featuring a wide range of bands, punk and
indie as well as pop. But then the marketers noticed that more girls than boys
actually bought Smash Hits. And in a cunning plan to expand their readership,
they aimed the magazine more and more towards girls. What they actually
achieved was to alienate a huge number of their readers, boys and tomboys among
them. The magazine began its slide towards pre-teen girliness, and once that
image was constructed, its audience was limited.
What kind of personal relationship or companionship can
Smash Hits offer its audience? Magazines have always tried to get their
audience to form a bond with the magazine: to write in with readers’ letters,
with problems and questions, to enter competitions and vote in readers’ polls.
All these serve to draw the reader closer to the brand values of the magazine,
to keep them loyal. So if you really love a band, you can write in, and stand
maybe a 1 in a 1000 chance of getting your letter published, probably about
three months later. It was good at the time, but then along came something
much, much better: the internet, with its chat rooms, its fansites, its MySpace
and its instant messaging. Suddenly you could access the actual people you
wanted to talk to, not just write in to the ‘middle man’ of a magazine. The
idea of a personal relationship with other fans and like-minded people, or even
with the band themselves, becomes real.
Lastly Smash Hits, like all other magazines, promised
entertainment and diversion; a few moments away from the boredom of everyday
life. Once, in world before iPods, before home computers, TVs in every room,
before emails and downloads, video games and MSN, a teenager’s bedroom was a
pretty lonely and isolated place. There wasn’t really much to do; so a magazine
was genuinely exciting. Learn the song lyrics, put the poster of Take That on
your wall – they were good times! But now, it just can’t compete. There are so
many more ways to be entertained. Particularly in relation to music, which is
an aural as well as a visual medium, multi-media sites enable us to hear, as
well as read about, the music, to see the performances instead of just looking
at a poster.
On all four aspects of the Four Needs theory, Smash Hits got
overtaken and outperformed. It may be that other music magazines survive
because they keep doing some things well. NME, for instance, is no more or less
entertaining to its readers than Smash Hits was to its readers, but it does
offer a positive personal identity as well. Perhaps music magazines have to
satisfy more than one of the four needs to remain successful products.
The social context for Smash Hits has changed too. We can’t
blame everything on Jamie Oliver: the battle against junk food had begun before
Jamie’s School Dinners. But a government push against advertising high fat high
sugar snacks and drinks to under-18s made a huge dent in the advertising
revenue of Smash Hits and other teen mags. Magazines like Heat and Nuts,
arguably as popular with teens as with anyone, are exempt from such government
pressure, as they are not directly targeted at under-18s. So Smash Hits took a
side blow that hit its income hard, collateral damage in the war on obesity.
In terms of its economic context, Smash Hits may well have
lost audience as its USP became less and less unique in the market place.
Competition from other print media, copying aspects of its early success, may
have gradually squeezed Smash Hits’ share of the market. If you read Smash Hits
for the interviews with stars, for the photos and pop news, you are likely to
be stolen away by the rather more adult pleasures of the celebrity gossip
magazine, especially as they were unconstrained by the moral codes and decency
expected of a teen mag. If it was the news and information you liked, the
tabloid press could satisfy you as they began to regularly feature ‘news’ about
pop personalities, along with all the other soft news stories. And if it was
the song lyrics you wanted, perhaps the nature of music itself killed this one
off. The dance music explosion and rise of the DJ in the 90s led a dearth of
songs with ‘proper lyrics.’ Without a USP,
Smash Hits’ share of the market declined.
From a high point of up to 1 milllion copies an issue in the
late 1980s, Smash Hits finished with a readership of just 120,000 for its last
issue.
A magazine like Kerrang! is still successful (see page 62),
perhaps because the mainstream media haven’t trodden on its toes to same extent.
Kerrang! does still feature news and information that isn’t easily available
elsewhere. Catering to a niche and non-mainstream audience has been useful in
helping it stay unique.
So what really killed Smash Hits? Was it failing to satisfy
its audiences’ needs or changes in the social and economic context? Whatever
the answer, Smash Hits has become a dusty relic of a bygone age: a time when
life was so dull that learning the lyrics to a Take That song seemed like a
great way to spend your evening. It will be spoken of with nostalgia by the
generation of people who still bought records on vinyl, watched Top of The Pops
every week, and couldn’t have imagined there would ever be any other way to get
as close to the stars as by reading Smash Hits.
(Sara Mills teaches
Media at Helston College, Cornwall, and is a AQA examiner.)
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 19.
Music Magazine Key Terms
Plug: Information about the contents of a magazine or newspaper given on the front cover
Puff: Words or phrases on the cover of a magazine used to boost status
Left-side third: A lot of important information designed to attract potential readers is placed in the left-hand side vertical third of the front cover page. This is in case the magazine is displayed in a horizontal shelving system rather than a vertical one.
Cover lines : Information about major articles given on the front page of a magazine
Masthead: The title of the magazine or newspaper. It is usually placed at the top of the front cover for display purposes
Prominence: involves using a personality, event or object that the target market collectively recognises and understands. It is part of a shared cultural knowledge. (Madonna in Versace spring 2005 GQ) for example.
Arousing curiosity: Ask the question ‘Why’. For example ‘Why our moisturiser has red hot chillies in it ‘. In women’s magazines especially the ‘how to...’ Construction. - How to get a boyfriend / Lose weight while eating even more ice cream / how to find out if he’s cheating on you.
Distraction: This is used to break down the resistance of the consumer. Look for strong visuals and graphics in the magazines. Haagen Daas co-opted greater discussion in the media about ‘adventurous sex’ as a way to keep your partner suddenly linking ice-cream to sex. Erotic imagery distracted the consumer as well as being suggestive.
Fantasy and escapism: The Bounty Bar on a tropical island is to associate myths, metaphors and associations with a Brand.
Consistency, familiarity and authority: People like to do business with people they know so advertisers try to establish their brands as trustworthy and familiar. How do advertisers make their claims credible? One way is by sheer dominance of the market-place. Getting a famous / neutral person to endorse the product. Science especially with body products for example. Words such as ‘Hydra Renewal’ (there is water content in the product)give an air of a laboratory. Use of ‘Experts’.
Memory and action: Much of the advertising in lifestyle magazines such as GQ uses an indirect form of selling associated with an emotional experience or a value ‘Pernod :Free the Spirit’ for example. ‘Carlsberg. The best lager in the world, probably’. There is a positive emotional response. When it comes to buying this is likely to differentiate the brand from say 5 other different lagers at the bar. Nike’s ‘ Just do it ‘ ads.
The Lead: the introductory paragraph of an article. Usually written in bold or capitals.
Body copy refers to the text of your written articles, which should be produced as a printed presentation to accepted industry standards, e.g. correct use of language, font size, word limits etc. Usually written in columns.
Serif font: fonts like Times New Roman, or Baskerville Old Face, which have little bars (serifs) on the end of the letters.
Sans serif font: fonts like Impact, or Agency FB, which do not have little bars (serifs) on the end of the letters.
Drop Capitals: Really big letter, which start off an article.
Cross Head: Small sub-heading used to split up a large block of text.
White Space: white parts of a page other than text or pictures.
Mode Of Address: How the magazine talks to the audience.
Sell Lines:Text on the cover that helps to sell the magazine to the audience. Kerrang!’s sell line is “life is loud”.
Banners: text, which stands out because its on a coloured background.
House Style: a magazines distinctive design that distinguishes it from its competitors.
Borders: the gaps at the edges of the page.
Gutters: the gaps between the columns of text.
Leading: the space between lines of text.
Kerning : the space between letters.
Strap Lines: a smaller headline, printed above the main headline.
By-lines: name of the person who wrote the article. Picture Credits - where did the photos come from, or who took them.
Anchorage: The way in which text helps to pin down the meaning of a picture and visa versa.
Body copy refers to the text of your written articles, which should be produced as a printed presentation to accepted industry standards, e.g. correct use of language, font size, word limits etc. Usually written in columns.
Serif font: fonts like Times New Roman, or Baskerville Old Face, which have little bars (serifs) on the end of the letters.
Sans serif font: fonts like Impact, or Agency FB, which do not have little bars (serifs) on the end of the letters.
Drop Capitals: Really big letter, which start off an article.
Cross Head: Small sub-heading used to split up a large block of text.
White Space: white parts of a page other than text or pictures.
Mode Of Address: How the magazine talks to the audience.
Sell Lines:Text on the cover that helps to sell the magazine to the audience. Kerrang!’s sell line is “life is loud”.
Banners: text, which stands out because its on a coloured background.
House Style: a magazines distinctive design that distinguishes it from its competitors.
Borders: the gaps at the edges of the page.
Gutters: the gaps between the columns of text.
Leading: the space between lines of text.
Kerning : the space between letters.
Strap Lines: a smaller headline, printed above the main headline.
By-lines: name of the person who wrote the article. Picture Credits - where did the photos come from, or who took them.
Anchorage: The way in which text helps to pin down the meaning of a picture and visa versa.
2013-2014
Year 12 Coursework:Keiron Barr, Peter Wareham, Hayley Scott, Gemma Pollard, Jordan Lydford, Beckie Hicks, Nick Oliver, Steven Thomas, Zach Lewis, Shannon Fitzmaurice, Pat Lee