Research Into NME Magazine.

NME (New Music Express) magazine is a British magazine reporting all the latest bands; it was first launched in 1952 and now is an established website, award ceremony and annual tour host. NME was originally associated with the punk rock genre however it also shares an insight into indie music, especially in later years. Released weekly NME’s current price is £2.30 and can be purchased from most super markets, newsagents and also online.
                The magazine has an average circulation of 56,284, but total readership of around 411,000. Its readership is prominently men, made up of around 73% male to 27% female with an average age of 25, and read by 73% ABC1 according to the NRS social grades. The magazines target audience is men aged 17-30.  NME reached its peak in 1970 when it was declared the best selling British Music magazine.
                In recent years NME underwent a redesign due to dropping sales, in order to attempt to appeal to a wider demographic. The new layout (example; bottom left) looks upmarket and classier than the old design, a distinction that more and more magazines are moving towards, rather than the usual crowded mass market design. It is more minimalistic than in previous years, and uses more sophisticated fonts, simpler graphics and minimalistic photographs. It uses few images, to give a less cluttered look and sticks to a basic colour scheme of a maximum of around 3 or 4 colours. These differences are clear in the two examples of NME cover's and the drastic redesign undergone, from the Morrissey special, released in 2006 and the Florence and the Machines edition, released in 2010.
                Before the re-design of NME a distinct mode of address was clearly used to ‘speak’ to its readership. The magazine expressed a distinctive ‘young’, energetic and informal language, and sounded quite masculine in certain ways. This is still true for NME however not only has the re-design toned down the general look of the music magazine’s cover it has also added a more neutral tone to the language and mode of address used, in order to appeal to a larger demographic.