N
nomadologist
Guest
As someone located in the US, it is always noteworthy to see how much attention and debate can be generated by the NME. Nomadologist mentioned a while ago on dissensus that the US simply does not have a similar comparand. Rolling Stone or Spin would, I guess, be the closest thing, yet they have seemed irrelevant for years - in Rolling Stone's case, I would say for decades. I for one can't remember the last time that I even looked at the cover of Rolling Stone, much less considered what was inside. I certainly couldn't tell you one thing about its preferences, writers, coverage of trends, or relevance for contemporary music audiences. This must have something to do with the size of the two countries and the difference in population? Or is there another explanation? I mean, with 300 million people in the states, someone buys these magazines, but that doesn't mean that they feel influential at all. Sorry, this was aside to the topic at hand I realize . . .
Tate, I think the key factor is the difference in our population sizes, as that is in direct proportion to the difference in the size of the market here. We just have so many more people (=listeners/consumers) that it seems there are exponentially more niche markets, at very least we can say there are many many more albums released. We're flooded with so much more information that only very significant trends even qualify as "trends."
It's funny as an American to look at, say, the dubstep or grime threads here and see how much of an influence such a new genre can have in the U.K. while it's barely been given an inch of copy in the U.S. I think it's safe to say basically no one here but the most informed and "hippest" music fans have ever heard of dubstep (and probably no one else ever will.) What's "commercially viable" here is held to much higher sales requirements than anything in Europe is: I remember what struck me first when I was living in Germany is how long a song would stay in the top 10 on the radio. Some stayed for literally 6 months. In the U.S. you fight to have a song stay in the top 40 for a summer!