No Rock And Roll Fun

CIRCULATORY FURTHERMENT: We were looking at the circulation figures for the nme earlier this week before the whole story had emerged, so it's only fair to point out that while their figures weren't exactly stellar, a massive slump in Kerrang sales has seen the NME regain its position as the biggest selling rock weekly in the world. Kerrang is down now to 70,361, discarding over 15% of its readership in the last year (most of whom grew up and realised Fred Durst and Korn are laughable in the last six months.) Rock Sound has also dumped fourteen percent of its readers, providing the sweet possibility that Nu-Rock really is, like, so, over. Q is doing better than this time last year, but not as well as six months ago and, unsurprisingly, the 'dump 'em in pubs' approach of The Fly means the giveaway title is pretty steady in the number of copies being used to mop up spilled beer, provide somewhere to write addresses on and just generally provide splifftastic material. Media Guardian has the, erm, Top Nine titles listed. Oddly absent from the website is the comments of the Kerrang spokesperson that appeared in Thursday's paper, where he suggested something to the effect that the drop in sales at Kerrang were just floating metal fans ebbing away, as if that made it alright and not disturbing. We don't remember Kerrang standing up when they overtook the NME saying "Please don't be fooled by our high sales, a lot of these are merely being bought by people who are following metal because it's trendy at the moment..."