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NME circulation at all time high as new magazine ABCs unveiled
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 12 August 2016
The latest ABC circulation figures for magazines were announced yesterday, with plenty of doom and gloom across the market if you’re looking for such a thing. According to the Press Gazette, across all the publications included in the latest set of stats, there was a 5.3% drop in sales year-on-year over the first six months of 2016, with the majority of titles seeing their circulations slip or slide.
Not all the music titles monitored by ABC were included in the latest stats pack, though of those that were, at least one was bucking the trend, with Top of The Pops magazine seeing its sales rise 2.2% to 43,944, possibly stealing readers from rival kids music mag We Love Pop, which saw its circulation slide 22% year-on-year, selling an average of 29,076 copies per edition. Uncut also saw a slight decline, down 2.6% to 48,305.
Though NME, of course, is scoring record circulation figures now that it’s a freebie title, which is cheating slightly, though its average weekly distribution this time of 308,606 is up 0.5% on what it was shifting during its first period as a free magazine. Publisher Time Inc UK also brags that ad revenues were up 13% for the period too.
Says Paul Cheal, Group MD of Time Inc UK’s Innovation Group: “NME has never been more influential and the brand is in a state of healthy growth. We’ve achieved big commercial wins across fashion, film and music this period including our first wholly native issue with Adidas, and advertising revenues have climbed by 13% on the period and 128% on the year. NME now reaches 2.4 million via social and NME.com has 5.8 million unique users each month”.
And in case you wondered why Kerrang! and Q aren’t featured here, it’s because the two Bauer-owned titles are now reporting ABC figures just once a year. A spokesman for the publisher told CMU: ‘With the Bauer magazine media portfolio now comprising of 94 titles, we have decided to move the music titles in line with the majority of our specialist titles which audit annually in order to provide a more stable view of sales. The next release will be in February 2017.’
