NME Launches Online Music Community

This week, NME launched Breakthrough, an online music community intended to help artists “grow their own fan-bases through community engagement.”

Music magazines know that their survival depends on the leveraging and expansion of their brands. Sometimes this means moving into presenting events (see Filter, The Fader), or slapping your logo onto a restaurant chain or video game franchise (right, Rolling Stone?), and it doesn’t always guarantee survival.

But on its surface, this looks like it could be promising.

Unlike the communities offered on sites like Reverb Nation or apps like Frindie, which are mostly populated by musicians, Breakthrough gives artists access to a sizable community of fans intent on discovering music, and NME staffers will help with that process by combing through the community ranks to look for artists it feels deserve highlighting.

The criteria for which bands will get featured isn’t stated explicitly, but it seems, from the look of these tips at least, that there will be an emphasis on bands that look good and write catchy material. So if you and your band are looking for a place to showcase your 19-minute-long ambient doom metal compositions, you probably shouldn’t count on much help from the Breakthrough editors. But as a direct line to what could potentially be hundreds of thousands of users, it’s much more efficient than anything else out there right now.

Tagged as: community, NME, Promotion, social media