Q - I buy it no more!

I subscribe to Uncut, and that has gone a bit Popswap lately too. They now pad it with Mr & Mrs type questions and have "stars" fill in a form with questions like; what's your favorite colour?
Just when you find a good mag, it all goes to hell.

undeniably both have gone downhill - Mojo wins out by miles

They are all a bit crap IMO. I tend to be steered by the freeby CD when deciding! At the end of the day Q tends to have a fairly comprehensive monthly album release section which is my principle reason for purchase.

I'm undecided as yet about the revamped Uncut. I definitely preferred it to the po-faced Beatles monthly, although that has featured some great cover CD's recently. Haven't read Q for years. The Word bores me shitless.

Record Collector is still OK - Mojo has decent cover CDs and at least, a couple of years back, it nominated Save My Soul by Wimple Winch as the greatest single of all time, which is fair enough in my book as I can't think of a better one.

I agree that they're all getting a it crap. The wire is ok at times but a little to out there and pretentious at times
or is it just pretentious to say so!!??

Try Fankie Perry's writing for Oui. She's got nice tits too. , Larry

Frankie with Billy and Dimebag Dave.

Mojo is still excellent and covers surprisingly varied genres. If its good and shows talent it gets in no matter what the style. If its crap, mass produced or unimaginitive it doesn't get a look in.

Jonathan

Oh yes! My visits have usually been to the Hifi thread, but I'm very glad I strayed.

Q was the first. Bit by bit it turned into young accountants weekly. I really don't want to know how much Pink Floyd grossed on T shirts, but that was around the yuppie 80s. Then it became very thin gruel with, now, it seems barely an article over a page long.

Mojo, in my recollection came next and filled the hole which was pretty much the shape that Q started in. Then, the wonderful journalism, which stretched to articles as long as 20 pages got cut back and cut back. Bit by bit, the nourishment became thinner and thinner. I actually think there is a place for the minilists, the soundbites, and usually turn straight to 'All back to my place'. But, there is a very little worth sitting down for if that is the only thing there is. I think, Mojo may have snatched itself back from the brink, but it was close for a time. And, it does need to do more than simply rotate the Beatles, Dylan and ... not many others.

Uncut, stepped up ... and guess what? Bit by bit it has dumbed down.

Word ...

Sure, I'm not saying the pattern is cast solid, but it seems to be there. Chasing popular circulation seems to be a recipe for nothing which I want to put on my plate and sit down to consume.

Richard

I think Word is utterly fantastic and is the only one I subscribe to. Mojo is still very good but when you look back at the old isues you realise it is not what it was. I agree with Simon that the monthly album overview is probably what kept me buying it for so long but I have begun to get peed of with the kind of albums they rave about. As a general rule of thumb, anything that they give 5 stars to will ,at best, be a 'guilty pleasure' in 5 years time, at worst, a total pile of dreck!

I thought it was me getting old and falling out of their target market. I've got q1 to q200(?) in my loft - I used to enjoy it now I don't.
Mojo's OK but a little too backwards looking for me. I buy about 5 issues a year. Last one I bought had a superb folk CD on it.
Uncut's redesign is horrid to read. Stopped buying.
Word is good in patches (usually an interesting cover CD at least). Buy about 4 times a year.
Songlines is good but specialist. Buy about 6 times a year.
What we need is something that addresses the "grey" [no implication being made there! ) pound/dollar - my preference would be music only - interested in old stuff, like to be stimulated with new stuff and no brown nose reviewers. Maybe this forum can take on this role? Articulate music lovers willing to experiment and write reviews needed - apply at the "what I am listening to now" thread

The problem facing Q seems pretty obvious to me ...falling sales (or at least a wish to gain bigger "mainstream" sales) why else the Madonna/Britney covers of a few months back?
Q seems not to want to even try for the MOJO/UNCUT market and has been dumbing down for years now.

At least "The Word" makes a stab at music in the bigger context of culture. Q just seems to have gone off the rails.

Billy Bragg interview particularly good.

Jono

I'm completely with Stevega and his list of wishes . Looking backwards and forwards at the same time is tricky, but not beyond the realm of the possible.

I've no problem with Q wandering off. Just like other relationships, isn't it? Sometimes things drift apart, other times they develop. Most of the time, you need several different relationships with several people to fulfill your various needs.

Oh dear, have I ended up sounding smutty? Didn't mean to.

The dumbing down (which others have mentioned, and I described before) is all the fault of the capitalist machine! A little bit of politics, heh! Can you imagine the directors of Q sitting around their shiny table and saying 'We have 11.8% of our demographic, and that is very acceptable. We should be happy if we can maintain that or keep it above 9.6%'. Never! One of the evils of the modern world - the triumph of quantity over quality.

Yeh I used to buy Q but it got as if the lunatics had taken over the asylum. Normally buy Mojo but that seems to be going the same way. Thinking of stopping that as well.