2007 NME editor trashed bands he’d never met (tabloid style tbh) casting aspersions about them because, and I quote, ‘I saw them jamming in a room together to some afrobeats stuff’. Quite apart from trashing any sense left in the music industry and unnecessarily antagonising bands, these racist cunts also built up this image of indie as a homogeneously cleansed, white, leather jacket-wearing, UK/NYC-exclusive thing that only greasy thin white boys could do, and then as soon as they’d successfully sown that image they called it ‘landfill indie’ so that they could sell a story, and fuckheads like that completely lost the magazine its credibility.
The literal SECOND musicians had the ability to go direct to social media on their phones and announce stuff on twitter instead of having the NME write about them, they took that opportunity. It could even perhaps be said that serial tabloidist Conor McNicholas is the sole reason the NME went out of print within a decade of him being in charge of it.