NME abandons slide, goes for tanking

Despite arch rival Kerrang losing nearly a third of its readership year-on-year, the NME still languishes behind the other weekly. The paper lost about a quarter of its readership, dipping below the 50,000 mark to just 48,549 copies a week. Kerrang is just about ahead, managing 52,272.

Actually, NME should worry about Kerrang - it's now being outstripped by Metal Hammer as well. With the NME.com website doing better than ever, unless something spectacular happens for the print edition, the simple force of economic wisdom suggests the NME will become a website that used to have a weekly magazine attached. By the way: leaping onto Skins about two years after it was hip, and just as the series was descending into Carry On Grange Hill clumsiness, isn't "something spectacular" in this context.

Eleswhere, Q is also shedding - just above the 100,000 mark, but 21.6% down on the year. Mojo had a smaller drop (100,507, 5.4% down) similar in size to the drop in Uncut's sales (87,069, 4.3%).

The sales figures for the music sector as a whole are grim reading for anyone who works in music magazines, or, indeed, loves music magazines.