UFO Info Week-End

Oasis Pulp and Blur should have been like manna from heaven to the NMEs and Selects of this world – because here

Oasis, Pulp and Blur should have been like manna from heaven to the NMEs and Selects of this world – because here were rock stars again NME increased its sales eight circulation periods in a row. The faceless creators of house and techno tunes hardly lent themselves to long features and personality journalism. Instead, they spent their time in their bedrooms and let DJs become the celebrities of the scene. DJs are, in the main, businessmen who are Lear-jetted around the country making thousands a night playing clubs. They rarely throw things out of hotel bedrooms and give paranoid interviews while on drugs.For some titles, like Q and Mojo, there was a living to be made throughout the dance music explosion by targeting older readers. If not, rock journalism is set to disappear forever into glossy magazines.
The last crisis to strike was dance music.

They will show whether a radical redesign, completed this month, has saved Britain’s most venerable music newspaper. Chris Evans will either make pounds 100m from all this or he will go bust.”. THE LAST word on music journalism was Frank Zappa’s. It was he who said: “People who cannot write, talking to people with nothing to say, for people who cannot read.”

Another truism is that the music press is always in crisis.

In the next few weeks the latest sales figures for NME will be released. The two showings of TFI Friday get 2.8m viewers together in slots that Channel 4 should expect to get nearer 5m. TFI has the advantage of keeping Evans and Ginger’s talents at Channel 4 – but a university pub-quiz show for BBC 2 starring Ginger producer Will MacDonald has yet to be recommissioned as a series, and the golfing show for Channel 4 hosted by Evans managed less than spectacular ratings.Ginger Television lost its chief executive, Michael Foster, in an acrimonious fall-out last autumn, and last week announced that Eileen Gallagher, the former managing director of London Weekend Television, would be taking over the television division.If Virgin’s ratings continue to fall – and impact on advertising revenue – then the other parts of Ginger have to do better at making programmes which sell.It will not be make or break for Chris Evans’s future as a media tycoon, but 4 February will provide another sign that a whole business cannot be based on one man’s broadcasting talents.”There is not a crisis at Ginger,” says one radio industry financier “But the size of the gamble seems to have gotten bigger. Sky’s ratings for the show are so low as to be unmeasurable, and on air Evans himself can be heard disparaging the small number of viewers.Other Ginger Television ventures have only been slightly more successful. Yet Ginger announced profits at Virgin of pounds 10.5m in October, which seemed an amazing turnaround for a station which is believed to have cost Richard Branson over pounds 10m since he started it.The profits come from the “Gingered” advertising revenue and a pounds 3m deal with BSkyB for the satellite broadcaster to sponsor the breakfast show and for Ginger Television to come up with programme ideas for Sky One.That Sky deal included simulcasting the Evans breakfast show on Sky each morning That show has not been a success. Apax will have no hesitation in taking over control of Ginger to get its value back.Indeed some observers believe that Ginger moved from its original offices and crammed everyone into Virgin Radio in Soho after six months because of an order from the Apax boss, Alan Patricoff, to cut costs. In the past, even very outwardly successful companies, such as the Covent Garden Soup Company, which have not fulfilled the Apax business plan, have been taken over.

But in return for taking bigger risks, Apax plays a very tough game. Its style is to take risks that UK venture capital firms won’t take, and it has been involved with Virgin since Branson launched it. The money came from venture capital company Apax Partners, which owns 20 per cent of the company More money was borrowed from the French bank Paribas. To raise the money for Branson, Evans effectively mortgaged his rights to TFI Friday and much of his future.Apax was set up to bring American-style venture capital to the UK. Richard Branson, who was planning to sell his station to Capital, swapped Virgin for 20 per cent of this new company and around pounds 16m.