music press adverts

I am obsessed with the advertisements in the old music papers - the New Wave era is particularly rich for the semiotician and lover of graphic design trends, but then so is the Old Wave era.  For a historian, it's almost as rich material to draw on as the actual journalism.

However that is not my subject today - my subject today is advertisements for the music press. 

I'm going to start looking for the ink-and-paper versions, which I suspect are clueless in the extreme.

 But for now here are four videos for weekly music papers, going from the early '80s to the 2000s.

These were posted by someone at ILM.

I  remember a radio advert for Melody Maker during my early years of being there that was a really irritating jingle and the chorus went something "Read music, read Melody Maker" in a sing-song sort of matey voice. Or was it "love music, read Melody Maker"? Can't recall but the jingle is lodged in my brain like an indestructible tapeworm.

There was also a T-shirt floating around that said something like "Melody Maker - Tomorrow's Music Today". 

In the actual music papers, you would get adverts for other music magazines sometimes - The Face advertised in NME regularly. 

Monitor actually bought some micro-ads to run in the NME and also The Face, I think. We had come into some funding. 

I can feel this post already extending itself towards future posts, including 1/ music journalists on television and 2/ fictionalized depictions of the rock press on television and in film. 

There's quite a lot of the former - as a taster, I give you this ruddy marvellous clip of the Stud Brothers being callously anti-humanist in 1989