Boycott the NME scam

AND THEY MADE IT COME TRUE!!!!

I'm so glad that they've finally come clean and just admitted that all they are now is just a giant wankrag. I highly approve.

snapped from Google:

Karmarama
Unexpected Creativity is a fresh approach to advertising, design and brand planning.
Karmarama was founded by Dave Buonaguidi and Naresh Ramchandani in 2000.
www.karmarama.com/

They have previously worked for EMAP [radio] so they have a track record working for large media companies.

Looking at the boycotttheNME website - why have they decided to go for a slick top up professional approach: London Street Posters, when their website has no bottom up substance/ content?

Who is the moronic brain behind this campaign: Steve Sutherland?

(I suppose it doesn't matter as both those sites are better than the real thing.)

From that site:

But there are other unpleasant goings on at King's Reach Towers beyond the insidious ideological connotations of the music they push. IPC freelancers (IPC being the media company which owns NME) are now forced to sign exclusivity contracts which mean they have to turn over interview tapes to the editors, meaning they cannot make use of any unused material on those tapes, even though they are only paid for the words that are printed. As many freelancers rely on unused material from interview tapes to build other pieces, this new policy means that writers must essentially pledge unwavering allegiance to NME's overriding aesthetic and ethos because they are hamstrung when it comes to attempting to write for anywhere else. This also means that the school of writers, and therefore opinions, at NME becomes ever-narrower. That the current crop of writers is also made up of young men barely out of the demographic they are so single-mindedly catering for means that whole seas of musical interest and history are alien to the regular staff. A cursory glance through any media supplements, databases and journals will reveal that NME consider their demographic to be 19 year old male students, that circulation has sat comfortably but not impressively at approximately 76,000 for a year or more now. But increasing circulation isn't a problem when income comes as much from the ephemera sold around the music (t-shirts, bags, classifieds, posters, badges, hats etcetera) as it does from retail and advertising revenue. And while advertisers may not be won over by generous and burgeoning sales figures, they are easily convinced of the degree of influence that NME now exerts over its readership.

If that's sophisticated marketing, umm, I can't come up with a punchline...

Somewhat reminiscent of that restaurant in Brighton where it says in the window: "The lowest paid staff in town! We pass the savings on to YOU!"

(Oh, BTW, I just linked this story, so if we get inundated by irate slashers, I apologise, it's my fault.)

Haha! Nail/head

Wankers

"confirms"? er ...

i'm really intrigued by this; because i'm a conspiracy theorist, i desperately want this "it's a scam by IPC" notion to be true. but, looking at that website ... i'm not sure. why would they go so far as to slag off their own tape-keeping policy, for instance?

and nobody seems to actually have any hard evidence. at least, they've not posted it here. so far it's a friend of the original poster saying something, and doomie saying: "i wondered when someone was going to lift the lid." doomie: does that mean you've known about this for ages and have evidence, or are you just saying that the existence of this thread helps validate a personal theory?

i'm not meaning to be inflammatory here: i'm genuinely interested in this. and, living in glasgow, i was totally unaware of this "campaign" until i read this thread.

answers! gimme FACTS!

http://www.boycottthenme.com/default.aspx?section=page&contentID=3

This could be a competitive intelligence/ market research strategy to gather information on the perceived consumer alternatives.

If this is a scam: the agency/IPC could use it analyse how the NME can improve to meet these needs, and increase their circulation.

There is something about the boycott website that is just not right, including:

a: using the NME logo [that logo is copyright protected]
b: no messageboard.
c: the copywriting style is far too slick.
d: secrecy of who is behind it.

A more natural anti-NME website would have taken the form of the Anti-Capital Xfm website back in 1998, which included a guestbook/ message board format as it's main protesting device.

and i've pointed out that if i don't get a reply, it'll certainly help convince me that they are :)

if they do reply ... well, we'll wait and see what they say before we start analysing it.

i shall, of course, keep you all informed!

all points are exactly why i go with the theory being proposed. tis all too slick. and the complete lack of identity, despite the 'I loved the NME when etc etc' .. anyone Real doing this would be more open.

The campaign posters at Waterloo station are amazingly amateurish, in which case I guess the ad agency involved must be oh so proud of themselves.

btw mark was that your letter in HHC ?

i've read it a few times since and every time i've boggled at its awfulness ... but i've always thought that might just have been me getting old. i mean, the stuff *i* loved (collins and maconie, ian mccann, david quantick) is reviled by many people who stopped reading in the eighties ... and so on.

i sat at the next table to a bunch of nme types, including the editor, at an awards dinner the other month. funny: i kept thinking how my 17-year-old self would have been beyond excited by such a prospect. as it was, i probably couldn't have given much less of a fuck. i was more concerned about how much booze i could get away with drinking on expenses.

but i suspect the poster space is still sufficiently expensive that ipc magazines would be a better bet for placing them than some random music fans... sigh...

fuck it, that *has* to be IPC, then. those things are ex-pen-sive. and if they're doing it illegally, surely the posters would have been taken down (and the people posting them prosecuted) within the day, no?

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/the_characters/images/icon_the_boss.gif

Rather than soliciting their existing readership for market research purposes - they are extending their research to find out why people are not buying the NME.

To do this a creative campaign was instigated as a honey trap to find out what are the perceived alternatives to the NME? Then from understanding these needs to incorporate them in the NME.

To conduct this type of extended market research [beyond the current readership] is difficult - hence this campaign.

The posters are just a decoy? for the real intent behind the campaign is to better understand why aren't more people buying the NME - and what are their music interests/ current music info sources.

But the irony is thatI think the reasons we are not buying the NME are summed up succinctly and precisely on the boycottthenme.com website. All they have to do (well, to have a hope) is exactly what that article already suggests, i.e. return to a wider range of music, wider range of staff, less fashion-lifestyle-ringtone nonsense. They seem to be acknowledging that...

not seen new issue. hope to do so today .. heard Akira is in it - and now some crappy words by yours truly.

tis almost too much excitement for one day.

I haven't seen advertising hoardings, so I pass, but am more believing that that is 'ironic marketing'.

The anti-prose regarding the ringtones and/or the reporter demographic and the circulation count seems to indicate against. The only thing 'for' is the logo, which may be 'copyright' but under the freedom of speech rules, that use would be allowed.

Does anybody really think that the NME would drop the ringtones/downloads promotions, even if the 'survey' showed 90% of potential readers were against it?

Boycott the NME, New Musical Express in favour of online magazines.

strange use of words !

there is something spectacularly fishy about this.

boycott the nme.com
... Boycott The NME. Don't write in and feed their need for faux-controversy. Object
in the easiest and most effective way possible - do not buy the NME. ...
www.boycottthenme.com/ - 4k -

look at the strange meta tag title, also seen at the top of the page when you view the website, why add .com [the website] when your against the magazine.

.. what with this and the Alexis, ET threads ILM is captivating stuff today ..

Momus attacks the NME of 2004: [aesthetics, design, philosophy, content, and lack of aspiration for music etc]
http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/56044.html

etc etc ..

Maybe this NME closes down ! and Uncut becomes the flagship IPC music title

Uncut ditches: films
Adds in more electronic music ala Muzik
Takes on a more contemporary cutting edge agenda of Melody Maker [pre Mark Sutherland]

Remember Uncut now has a larger issue readership than the NME.

In a ideal world Uncut renames itself Melody Maker ! and NME can f-off

Oh wait, you actually care about music or art or something? Oh, I gave up on that years ago.

The future is now!

Registrant:
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(480) 624-2599

Domain servers in listed order:
NS0.HOSTWARE.CO.UK
NS1.HOSTWARE.CO.UK

launched September 15th, a few? days after the worst ever NME issue [that 1001 facts rubbish]

that's what this lot do: http://www.domainsbyproxy.com/

given the site is anonymous, it's hardly surprising the registration information is anonymous too - no matter who's behind it.

it all confuses me rather. if you don't like the NME you don't buy it anyway. It still has it's place for a certain group. I still like it, but I wouldn't rely on it to get ALL my musical information from - I just like big pictures.

a: artrocker
b: Drowned in Sound
c: EMAP
d: Felix Dennis [Blender] to launch a UK magazine
e: someone else

well, a certain boring rock band that's fer sure.

whoever's behind it, they're up to something suspect.

mind you: who isn't?

Our politics and personal lives aren't important and that's why we're "secret". The logo copyright isn't an issue until someone threatens to sue. Until then it stays. And who says that those poster boards were paid for?

Thanks for the compliments on the writing style though. And it's nice that you all think it's slick.

You're all cynical fuckers, aren't you?

JUST SAY NO!

What to do if your horse has diarrhoea – when does it become an emergency?

I mean, even I could answer that question, and I don't even have a horse. It becomes an emergency at around three feet.

Mind you, I like "Heavy Horses" by Jethro Tull.

this is what they wrote:

It's not a scam. The reason we're not interested in saying who we are is because we aren't interested in people digging into our politics. Just like the personal lives of those at the NME are of no relevance to their output.

We're putting posters up in London about this campaign. We're writing
articles damning the NME. And the site is hardly the epitome of
corporate hell, is it? No adverts in site. So just keep an eye on what
we're doing and see how it pans out. We're not lying, we're not a covert marketing front. The proof will be in our actions.

Boycott The NME.

which is kinda ... unnecessarily snippy, given i was quite polite. for me.

i might start buying the NME again, just to fuck them off :)

Didn't read 'snippy' to me, read 'fair enough' to me.

yeh, you're right, actually. it didn't look as snippy once i'd posted it here. still, they called us all "cynical fuckers" above, so i'm not gonna lose too much sleep.

Or was it - writers??? ?

yes...but WAS it?

(xcept me)

ps. the guy who did the very first post was winding you lot up and i'll admit, i followed him (i was camden slut) and ditched it when i got bored.

hmmmmmmmm. looking back at the thread: the majority of us were unconvinced. my line was "i'm a conspiracy theorist and i'd love this to be true, but it looks half-assed" ... and hey, i feel vindicated :)

-- grimly fiendish (simonmai...), May 12th, 2005 3:39 PM.

And it wasn't me being snippy - it was Colin (webdesigner). He's incredibly rude, actually. Probably cos he spends all his time fiddling with computers rather than gurlz. I suggested the idea and wrote the blurb, he did everything else apart from the posters, which was his mate in London.

Yes, Nathan Barley. That's the one.

Marvellous jape.

"elaborate work of web design ever... surely?"

It wasn't supposed to be. I didn't have time to come up with anything flashy so I settled for good looking minimalism. Setting up the whole thing (including all the techie stuff) probably took half a day.

hot.air.balloo came closest to finding us out. By looking up the domain name details he came up with the address of the site's nameservers. From there it's possible to find out which company I work for. You could have phoned us up and asked me if I worked for IPC or not.

And Southall - I've moved! I live near Newcastle now, which is a step up from Boro in anyone's books. Much better location to be incredibly rude from.

Bye!

ps. i sent you those emails colin just as a laugh from different accounts.