nme.com - ballad of the dot.com boom?

I'd say nme.com is the only music website I look at daily - apart from this one, of course! This bizarre decision looks like another nail in the coffin for the paper - and whether you love it or hate it, the UK without the NME would be a poorer place.

I thought the website was very poorly designed. Navigation impossible, it crashed every time I used it until I just stopped bothering. Shame, it could've been fantastic.

NME.com - all the pages took ages to load, and there was never that much on them.

I love the way it's only rubbish .com companies that fold.

NME.com is a poor, poor website. Bugger all content and it never seems to want to work properly. Good riddance to it if it folds, like the 'real' paper.

Yeah they take forever to load. But i always check the reviews, which are generaly spot-on. So bummer.

Dot.com bubble was always gonna burst. NME.com, the few times I went there was painfully slow, and the gig search bit was way too sensitive.

Crashed both times I tried it, never went back.

NME.kom = k-sux0r. Everything takes forever to come down, and if U try to use hax0rspeak in "angst" it filters half the characters out, & leaves meaningless gibberish in its place. Besides which, it's connected w/thee NME, so it's duty bound to suck, iznit?

xoxo

NME.com seemed to go into frantic POP-UP window advert override recently, when a site starts to use Porn style advertising tactics you know its on its way out..

According to the Guardian IPC spared nme.com (this time): 'IPC said that it would refocus its digital strategy on six sites: NME.com, countrylife.co.uk, decanter.com, horseandhound.co.uk, web- user.co.uk and ybw.com.'

I also found nme.com's marketing-speak, load speed and navigation diabolical. 'Competitions, offers, freebies... AND MORE!!!'

decanter.com, on the other hand, is a jolly nice site: 'Some gorgeous picnic hampers, the world's top spots for al fresco dining and over 30 delectable wines for summer drinking...' Golly darling, pour me another muscadet and pass that copy of Horse and Hound! Let's hope the Americans understand how important these titles are to The British Way Of Life!

Betcha, ooh, Mark Beaumont secretly reads Horse and Hound ...

I heard they were some lay offs but the website people remained employed (because the website is doing pretty well). Maybe my source was wrong?

I've heard that there is, like the original poster said, indeed about five or six people left keeping the back end working. Hm.

I'm more of a www.harpersandqueen.co.uk fan myself.

Do they really need more than 5 people? Full-time? I mean, come on.

In an ideal world the right 5 people working full time would be enough, but they are control freaks at NME.com told what to include and written in a uniform style.

From now on NME.com will become exclusively news oriented which just means rehashing PR briefs of high profile/ mainstream/established artists for mainstream audiences. Just take a look at their news pages of the indicative artists covered and then compare it with my weblog there is a very significant contrast.

NME.com is too overtly high profile/ celebrity mainstream - they have forgotten about discovering new music!

IMHO AOL Time Warner want NME.com to compete with Ananova - running a news desk fed by the PR machine - this turns journalists into automated dummies with no room to innovative, enthuse and discover new music. Instead of setting the agenda they will merely reflect the establishment.

What this means is that NME.com/ NME will stagnate further reflecting the establishment/preserving the status quo/resisting change/restricting choice/declining opportunites for new music and artists etc

In short it will only get worse!

i think you'll find the changes to IPC's web structure were in place andplanned before the AOL takeover.

Indeed? Explains the seeming 'haste' of the transition, then, but still leaves the impression that AOL did the gutting -- which, of course, might be what IPC wanted to do!

pah!

nme circulation at 70,000? in their dreams. morelike 30,000. they only hit 70,000 when they shove a cd in front of the mag during the abc count.

the nme? wasn't that something on I Love The 90s?