Unfashionable Music Alert

Sometimes, especially when you are stuck in traffic in Glasgow, as I was the other day, something noisy and upbeat is the only thing that will do.

AOR, Melodic Rock, whatever you want to call it has never been fashionable, but scratch the surface and you will find a lot of people admitting to listening as a "guilty pleasure". Why feel guilty about it? There is as much dross as any other genre but there are some great records both old and new waiting for you to sing along.

When The X Factor had a moment with Don't Stop Believing a few years ago (why it wasn't the winners single that year I don't know),  the Journey original shot up the charts. While Journey are far from my favourite band the song has most streamed/downloaded song status on many portals and in lots of countries.

Who should you be listening to and where do you find out about it?

Work Of Art. Four albums into their career, they have yet to produce anything below an 8 out of 10 record. Play this loud

 

Radioactive. I did a whole post on Tommy Denander a while ago. His name is a mark of quality and you should buy anything he is on. The Radioactive albums are his best though.

A recent album from a new band The Defiants, 'Zokusho' has been hailed as album of the year for 2019 in many quarters.

Terry Brock has appeared on some great albums, solo, with Strangeways and as a guest artist. This is one of his best songs.

Hopefully that has whetted your appetite so where can you learn more? Best magazine by far is Fireworks. There is usually a free digital copy to be had of a back issue here, so give it a try.

Rob Evan's AOR Underground appears in Powerplay magazine, which is a bit more heavy metal focused than Fireworks but still worth a read. He is also on Facebook here.

Melodic Rock, run from Australia by Andrew McNeice is the best online portal, lots of reviews and news.

And that is AOR/Melodic Rock. Way more to it than Journey, Toto, or Giant. If you like a good tune then this is the genre for you, and one that gets a lot of play on the iPod, especially in the car.

Will the last reader please turn off the lights

The December 2018 issue of Jazz Journal was the last print edition after 70 years. We are constantly hearing about the hardships of print in the face of the online world, but your local WH Smiths has hundreds of magazines on the shelves, presumably selling in quantities good enough to keep going. So why did Jazz Journal fail and what lessons can we draw from it for the wider print world.

To jump off the shelves a magazine needs a certain amount of kerb appeal, something to engage the casual reader and prompt an impulse purchase. Compare Jazz Journal’s gloomy often black & white images and subdued colours to the big bright glossy images of its nearest competitor, Jazzwise, and other niche music titles all shouting their wares and it seems almost designed to sit on the racks. I recognise this was a cost issue as was the cheaper paper stock, and the frankly skimpy page count, but no attempt seemed to be made to make the magazine attractive to anyone other than the committed reader seeking it out. 

It’s worth comparing Jazz Journal to another niche music magazine, albeit one catering to a different audience that has adapted and certainly appears to be thriving, Fireworks - Rock and Metal. This started in 2000, and having bounced between monthly and bi monthly the publishers settled on a quarterly magazine sometime ago. Since then the magazine has grown to 150 pages, and a cd with mp3 and PDF files on it. Plenty enough to read for three months. As many of these types of magazines are part time ventures this takes away the pressure of deadlines or providing a news service, leaving space for articles, interviews and reviews to stretch out. The magazine title has shifted, the original Fireworks is a very obscure album title reference, and the original strap line “The Melodic Rock Magazine” (a niche within a niche) has been replaced with the current on "Rock and Metal" being larger than the title, beating its potential audience over the head with the message. Better covers, better design, better writing as well, make the magazine an attractive proposition both on the rack and leafing through it.  

Jazz Journal stayed rooted in 1966, appealing to a long-term core readership that dwindled with each passing year. Recent attempts to update were too little too late and met with vitriol from the readers. The casual Jazz listener, me, found nothing in it except complaints about change, and nostalgia for the way things were. In the end unwillingness to compromise with the audience killed it. Oddly with the resurgence in Jazz over the last year or so the market for a Mojo style legacy magazine covering Jazz is probably larger than ever, and Jazz Journal could easily have become that, republishing material from its past in much the same way as Uncut exploits the Melody Maker archive. 

The importance of an online presence to back up the print edition can’t be overstated. Fireworks works with the Rocktopia website, adding unique content to the site, which also acts as a news resource for the magazine. That coupled with an active, colourful social media presence, and being active in the online community means the print magazine is always reaching out to its audience. Jazz Journal’s sporadic mostly text only tweets and Facebook posts are another light under bushel moment. 

It sounds like I’m being harsh on a magazine with a long and distinguished run, but it’s the market that decides who survives, and it has delivered a judgement on Jazz Journal. The message is clearly; adapt and survive, stagnate and fail.

Who said print was dead?

It’s Record Store Day 2018 so I’m going to talk about music magazines.Find it on my Linkedin feed HERE

Reading Matter

I have always been a big fan of music magazines. Back in the beginning there was Sounds which always had a wider range of music than NME. NME was always a bit intimidating, out in Keynsham we never felt quite cool enough for it. Sounds spoke to the kids in out of the way places, like Keynsham!

About 1978 there was a short lived glossy magazine called, Rock On. This was what would today be called a legacy magazine (Mojo, Classic Rock) and had articles on the history of bands like Pink Floyd, Status Quo and Fleetwood Mac, with reviews and posters. Terrible writing and worse editing (I know now) but for the information starved teenage budding rock fan, absolute gold.

Later on there were sneaky reads of my sister's Smash Hits and buying Sounds International and Musician, but until Q, started up in the mid eighties there was a drought so far as informative magazines were concerned.

Recently I read Mark Ellen's memoir of his magazine days "Rock Stars Stole My Life!" A great read (or listen; I did the Audiobook), which tells you a lot about the business of music writing as well as the gossip. He tells of leaving Mojo when the corporate world became too much and the life and death of The Word, a magazine I read from first to last issues and loved for the quality of it's writing and depth of knowledge. In fact my reading journey seems to have followed Ellen, Smash Hits, Q, Select, Mojo, The Word...

So today following the collapse of Team Rock at the end of 2016, the general decline in readership and the advertising revenue that supports it, we have the general reads like Q, the legacy mags, Mojo, Classic Rock etc forever looking over their shoulders, and increasingly niche publications aimed at ever tighter segments of the market. Country, Prog, Blues all have their own, and now Planet Rock Radio have started a new competitor to Classic Rock. The downside is that the really good niche rock papers, Fireworks and Powerplay will likely lose sales to it as well. As both these but particularly  Firworks are written with care, knowledge and an understanding of the reader's expectations they need to survive, if nothing else to ensure we aren't just fed magazines that are aimed more
at the needs of advertising than written for the music fan.

What do I read currently?

Fireworks, AOR, Hard Rock, increasingly drifting into other related areas. If this is your thing buy it.
Mojo If it has something on the cover that interests me (about twice a year)
Uncut Ditto
Shindig Back when it was quarterly it was a brilliant on 60s, 70s and obscurities that you had to rush out and listen to, now Monthly there has been a slip in quality. The recent article on Be Bop Deluxe was such a car crash that I haven't been back, although when something interesting appears on the cover I will doubtless buy it. Reviews section always has something good in it.
JazzWise best Jazz magazine by far.

Online magazines are getting better all the time, I like Louder Than War and Paste

And then there are Blogs, but that's another kettle of worms altogether...