Critics say music weekly with proud history no longer has the huge relevance it once had
One of the perils of being an institution is that you get gossiped about. So it is with the NME, the totemic name in British music journalism.
In recent weeks, following the announcement the music weekly's circulation had fallen to 27,650, the music industry has been abuzz with rumours: its staff have been told to ditch the coverage of guitar bands and concentrate on urban music; one issue before Christmas was bought by just 12,000 people; it will be going free any day now.
All untrue, according to Krissi Murison, the NME's 30-year-old editor. "There hasn't been an edict from me," she says of the first suggestion. "Categorically untrue," she responds to the second. "Free is not something we're looking at," she offers to the third.
The New Musical Express was born in March 1952 and, as it approaches its 60th birthday next month – and with its annual awards taking place at the Brixton Academy in London on Wednesday – it has much to be proud of. There's a widespread consensus, too, that Murison has done a decent job since taking over in July 2009.
"It's a pretty good magazine at the moment," says Geoff Travis, the founder of Rough Trade – a label whose successes, including the Smiths, the Strokes and the Libertines, have been closely identified with the NME.
But there is also a sense that it lost its way under the editorship of Murison's predecessor, Conor McNicholas (2002-2009), during which time it entered a spiral from which some fear it will never recover.
"I do think Conor's editorship seemed to be more about brand sponsorship and selling things that weren't to do with music in a way that probably harmed the integrity of the magazine," Travis says.
"There was too much focus on expanding into some kind of empire while their core thing was being challenged," says Ollie Jacob, co-founder of the Memphis Industries label. "Their core thing should be good writing and finding new bands."
Murison is bullish in her defence of the title, talking of its "amazing access and exclusivity" and it being "the most cutting edge in terms of the new artists we talk about".
She is also fed up of naysayers who look only at the falling print circulation figures but ignore the 7 million monthly unique visitors to NME.com and the fact that the print edition still brings in the major part of NME's revenues.
She talks enthusiastically of the magazine's embrace of the past over the last year, when it ran a number of retrospective cover stories.
"Young fans really love these covers," she says. "Our focus groups get really excited when it's the Smiths or John Lennon. You used to be really limited in what you could listen to, but now you have access to everything – young readers don't think chronologically about music."
However, a widespread feeling within the music industry is that the loss of print readers has cost the NME something vital: its influence.
"NME's perceived importance in breaking a new band is completely disproportionate and out of whack to its actual importance – it's just taking bands, managers and myopic record company marketeers a long time to understand that," says one major label publicist, speaking on condition of anonymity, and replicating the thoughts of others who did not wish to be quoted.
"Its relevance used to sit with its signified importance to the likes of Radio 1 – that the approbation of the former would inevitably then turn the heads of the latter," the publicist says.
"That's no longer the case, as Radio 1 now looks to myriad other signifiers to gauge an artist's true 'heat'. So for that read YouTube hits, Facebook stats, Shazam and so on. These are the new brokers of what's hot and what's not."
Murison, unsurprisingly, does not take that view. She talks of how the NME still "sets the agenda" and of how "every band still wants to be on the cover of the NME".
But Jacob says coverage in Mojo magazine is now more useful to Memphis Industries than the NME, and says young bands joining the label are more likely to be regular readers of American websites such as Pitchfork, Stereogum or Gorilla vs Bear. "I don't think any of them would go to NME.com to find a band," he says.
"The NME's a vital part of our history," Travis says. "I'd be terribly sad to see it go." But in an age where countless online outlets provide news and reviews, is there still a place – even after 60 years – for the NME as a weekly magazine in print? "I think we could do without it," Travis says ruefully. "Something else would take its place."