Analysis Of Magazine Sales

'NME', formally known as 'New Musical Express' and Kerrang face big problems as the consumer magazine sector suffered a joint circulation staggering drop of nearly 10% in the first half of this year (2009). NME, which was overtaken by Future Publishing monthly Metal Hammer from mid 2008 for the first time averaged a circulation of around 40,948 from January to July. Comaparing this with sales from the same time period in 2008, sales had dropped by an immense 27.2%.

Bauer Media's 'Kerrang!' has managed to keep their sales slighlty better than NME, but only just. Now also overtaken by Metal Hammer, Kerrang! saw its average sales fall 28.3% year on year to 43,253. Metal Hammer lost 5.2% sales year on year, down to 46,004.

Bauer Media's Q remains the market leader despite losing 11.5% of its sales year on year, down to 100,172. Q's Bauer stablemate Mojo also lost sales, down 8.1% year on year to 97,722. But Q's lead over Mojo has been reduced to just 2,450 compared with 6,807 a year ago.

Future Publishing's Classic Rock was the only paid-for music title to record a year-on-year increase, up 5.5% to 70,301. Classic Rock closed the gap on IPC's Uncut, which was down 12% to 76,526. In the first half of last year Uncut's lead over Classic Rock was 20,293. Now it is 6,225.
Channelfly Enterprises's free music monthly The Fly remains the sector leader with an average distribution of 107,771, up 2.4% year on year.

Overall, the music sector's combined circulation of 582,697 was down 9.4% year on year and 5% on the last six months of 2008.


My Analysis of the sales:

It is clear that over the last year or so, magazines sales have dropped a considerable amount, it is important that there are a varied number of music magazine products that all people can relate to, whether they favour heavy metal or popular music there should be something out there for everyone.

Kerrang! and NME are one of the top music magazines in the industry which makes decreasing sales hard to understand. They need to maintain the funky fresh unique qualities of the magazine that they had when sales were at their highest.