POPWORLD PULP #2 (68pp, £1.49)

So, goodbye then, the ironically and prophetically-titled Popworld Pulp: we hardly knew ye. But should we have wanted to get to know you? Have we prematurely aborted what could have been the saviour of the music press, cruelly killed off after a mere two issues?

Oh, what do you think?

On announcing the magazine's untimely demise, publisher Darren Styles commented that, "the magazine has bombed in a way nobody connected with it could ever have envisaged." Oh, if only they had sent me a copy of their dummy issues for my feedback. This is perhaps bolting the stable door after the horse has already been made into glue, but nonetheless, here are my thoughts on how Popworld Pulp can (could) be made (have been made) better (not quite as shit as it was). But first of all, what did they get right?

THINGS POPWORLD PULP GOT RIGHT:

1. The price. At £1.49 it's around 60p cheaper than its main competitors, NME and Kerrang, so, erm, well done, there!

2. Er...

3. That's it.

FIVE PIECES OF ADVICE I WOULD HAVE GIVEN TO POPWORLD PULP:

1. Actually let people know that your magazine is for sale.

   Now, I might be slightly outside of the magazine's target demographic of 16-24 year olds, but even so, as someone with an interest in rock and pop music I probably should have heard something about the launch of the magazine, rather than stumbling across it in WH Smith while browsing on my lunch hour. Where, if anywhere, has it been advertised? The only media coverage I have seen was after it had been axed. Perhaps if it had been marketed a little better (or, y'know, marketed at all) then it could've had a fighting chance. Well done, Advertising Director Greg Askew! I'm sure they won't “ask you” to market their magazines again! Ha ha ha!

2. Don't just cover the same bands as your rival publications.

   Cover stars of this second issue: Fall Out Boy. Other bands mentioned on the cover: Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs, Arctic Monkeys, Maximo Park, Little Man Tate... it's just an ersatz-NME, isn't it? Why assume that NME readers would stop reading their well-established crap-rag in favour of your fledgling new crap-rag? It's a tie-in with Popworld, so cover the same variety of artists as Popworld! That's your USP! Be a pop magazine, not an indie magazine pretending to be a pop magazine.

3. Employ writers who can write, and who actually care about pop music, not just about the latest trends.

See, I naively had high hopes for Popworld Pulp (or “PWP” as they irritatingly abbreviate it to). I was hoping it was going to be the spiritual successor to early Smash Hits: a humourous, irreverent mag that both mocked and celebrated the ridiculousness of pop music and pop stars, or at the very least a magazine that captured the (mean) spirit of the Simon Amstell era of the show. Instead, we are offered re-heated news stories that will seem out of date to the magazine's internet-savvy target audience, links to Youtube videos that would be better-suited to, I dunno, a BLOG OR A WEBSITE OR SOMETHING rather than a print mag (who is going to type in URLs in this day and age? Duh! Like, get with the times, grandad, as Popworld's Alexa would no doubt say on Get a Grip), and bland, charmless, characterless, soulless say-nothing reviews and interviews. Where is our (well, their) generation's David Quantick or Mark Ellen? He or she sure as shit aren't writing for this magazine. But then, I'm probably expecting too much – remember Heat's early days, when it was a relatively intelligent and knowledgeable magazine? It didn't start to sell until it was turned into the celeb-spotting plebfest that we know and... well, that we know today. To expect a new weekly youth magazine to have a modicum of intelligence is foolishness on my part, I suppose.

4. Remember to include some text to go with the pictures.

   Too many pictures, not enough text. Ver kids can get pictures aplenty on the internet, why pay £1.49 for them? The album reviews are too short (much shorter than this review of their magazine, which is frankly about 1000 words longer than they deserve), and single reviews are a mere two sentences long. What's the point of a music magazine if you don't (or can't) write about music?

5. Don't launch a weekly music magazine aimed at teenagers in 2007 as there is no way in the world it will sell, you clueless, cretinous TWATS.

   Seriously, who thought this was a good idea? Who? If they'd done it right it could have been Smash Hits for the iPod generation; instead they've produced NME for the Heat generation, lacking in both substance and style. Utterly pointless. Who was their imagined target audience? The kids have already turned to MySpace as their source of the new music, and the self-proclaimed “proper music fans” of that age all read NME or Kerrang already. The sales figures speak for themselves: print run of 130,000, estimated sales of 60,000, actual sales of 9,000. There are specialist fanzines catering to minority interests that sell more than that! Perhaps twelve or more years ago a magazine like PWP may have had a fighting chance on the newsstands, as it's not unlike Raw when it relaunched itself as an indie mag. But look what happened to Raw. The signs were all there, people! It could never have worked. It was brave – but ultimately stupid – to even try.

To end, let us return to (ex-)publisher Darren Styles. So Daz, what went wrong?

"Every piece of research we did, every dummy we created and the concept in all its forms was fantastically received from first to last. The industry wanted it, the news trade wanted it, the market was there according to every group we asked - but come the acid test the readers were absent."

Yeah, them pesky readers! Everyone else wanted it except, erm, THE VERY PEOPLE IT WAS DESIGNED FOR. Well done to all involved! Ten of the magazine's 14 staff members have been made redundant; that's four too few if you ask me. You never know, perhaps some of them will find employment at the real, actual NME that they wanted so very much to be and, fingers crossed, perhaps they can sink that, too. Good luck!