I have started reading the NME around 1975 when the sixties’ aesthetics prevailed and have gone through the stress of accepting the new wave with the intense promotion of it by the NME. I still remember Bob Marley appearing on its cover as the end of the teenage world I grew up, where the long haired bands ruled cool. Punk and reggae magnificently shattered it all, giving us a pristine second youth and the belief that rock was immortal and eternally self-regenerative. I am not sad for the NME’s demise, but am for the R’n’R’s 🙂 And, yes, it is sad to have dead or old people on the covers… Can’t help it though, better them than the bland kids 😉 And now, the NME is no more.

And here is one reader’s (paulbaron) thoughtful comment: In the bad old days when you had to pay £14 to find out what a new CD sounded like, stuff like the NME seemed to offer some value as a guide to what was out there, what it might sound like, and whether it might be a worthy purchase for people in the categories of taste or society you identified with. I don’t feel any better about my taste being curated by a profit-seeking publication (with editorial pressure) than my politics by a newspaper.

I don’t have any particular nostalgia for any print music media.

The *internet* really did kill off NME and others like it, in multiple ways:

* You needn’t pay to read something that took that long to reach you

* You don’t need to have someone describe music to you before buying: you can just listen to it! (and rightly so)

* Being able to discover so much, so widely and with ever-lessening barriers between genre-tribes makes it less and less practical to offer that ‘light in the darkness’ guidance to the great unheard for a broad audience.

In short, the internet is the cause of death, but it’s a compound set of effects, And we’re all better off!