Thursday, April 19, 2007
So soon?
"To be perfectly frank Popworld Pulp has bombed in a way nobody connected with it could ever have envisaged," said Darren Styles, the chief executive of Brooklands Group, with refreshing frankness. They'll probably be raising glasses at NME and Kerrang with whom it was intended to compete. They shouldn't. Closing a weekly after two weeks (which means they must have made the decision within 24 hours of the first issue going on sale) just after property magazine So London did something similar underlines just how hard it is to get people to even try something nowadays, even with TV promotion and giveaways at gigs. They say the first issue sold 9,000 on a distribution of 140,000. It was probably less. Brooklands spent the best part of a year and a lot of money developing this title. Maybe they should have just put it out and let it do its development in the world. Like they say, if you want to learn how to fight, go and punch someone.
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And if you ARE going to do a tie-in magazine, maybe make the word 'Popworld' rather than 'Pulp' the bigger word on the masthead. There aren't so many people who'd buy a mag hoping it was about Jarvis Cocker's ex-band.
ReplyDeleteI think there's some official reason why it couldn't be branded Popworld in big letters. Dave will probably know.
ReplyDeleteWhat worries me is that there must have been some piece of expensive research in there that said "the kids" don't care who writes the copy, as even rated album reviews had no byline.
Then where would we be?
I remember when a new mag called Encore launched against Q when Danny Kelly was editor. He was suitably enraged. He actually put a coded line up the spine of the next issue of Q - it was a Morrissey cover and it read, "Kill Encore."
Encore lasted . . . one issue.
The trouble with PULP was there's already a magazine that does all these things and does them much, much better and has great photography and - on occassion - really good writing and a global presence. And a point for existing. When I first heard about this I thought - NME will kill this in a month. But, of course, they didn't need to dom anything. Just like they didn't need to kill XRay, Bang and the rest. I don't know if many of you looked inside, but it was thin, desperate fayre, seemingly cobbled together from the off-cuts from other people's interviews (hence the anonymity, I suppose).
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