Why is Hot Press still around ?

Dick Darlington

It's such a bad mag !
I got a free yrs subscription about 18 months ago and my eyes were opened by how boring it is.

The mistakes they make were unbelieveable from the article where they discussed why "the fly" was left off U2's best of (it was on it) to reviewing The Mars Volta's new album "Francis the Mule", albums are also reviewed a few weeks late. A full page review for Girls Aloud album, quater of a page for Queens of the Stone Age.
Their articles at the front on subjects such as immigration, refugees terrorism etc are so rubbish and out of touch it's ridiculous.

There was also the front cover condemming Eminem and how he was going to ruin every child in the world with his filth and then a few months later he's hailed as the saviour of music on another cover, written by the same guy !!

There's also the fact they dribble every time U2/ThFrames break wind and always give both flawless reviews.

The only good thing they have going for them is Olaf Tyransen, the only good journalist they have.

goo

They gave the "America Wakes Up" issue out free at College ages ago. It had REM on the cover and was absolutely ****e.

Now, I used to buy the NME every week, so I know a **** magazine when I see it. It's ****ing muddled between a music and "cultural" magazine, but in the end is just dirge.

GerryManderer

Out of touch, onanistic, self-loathing, grandiose, arrogant, aloof, dull, preachy, contradictory, self-congratulatory, socialist idiot.

And that's just Niall Stokes. Don't even start me on the rest of the problems with HP.

Idiots. :mad:

cashback

Yeah can't stand listening to Stuart Clark when he's on Dave Fanning or something. I bought Hot Press last week for only the second time and won't be buying it again. The odd interesting interview aside, there's nothing in it.
Interesting to see it's circulation is only about 19,000.

Mr E

19000 x €3.50 x twice a month isn't a bad turnover.
Add advertising revenue, and you've got a pretty successful business.

cashback

Maybe so. Just sounds fairly small to me I suppose. I think its circulation used to be higher.

HarryHoudini

Yeah, I'd have to agree, bought a years subscription about 6 months ago and spend around 15mins flicking through it and then it gets thrown to one side, I'll pick it up every now and again and skim through it.
Best thing about it is Olaf whatshisnames articles from thailand, the magazines saving grace i'm afraid.

DublinWriter

GerryManderer wrote:

Out of touch, onanistic, self-loathing, grandiose, arrogant, aloof, dull, preachy, contradictory, self-congratulatory,

True, it used to be 'the' posey mag to walk around with in the mid-80's.

It me, it characterises all that is wrong with the media in this country - stale and cliquèy - see also RTE, Irish Times.

...and also the general system, reffering to what Niall Stokes did for Michael D. Higgins and vice-versa.

Dick Darlington

Very rare you even learn any sort of interesting fact in it, last months was "the Oxegen issue", interview with the killers which was actually an article with various quotes from over the last yr r so and not any sort of direct interview and a free booklet for Oxegen which had nothing to do with Oxegen r any information in it !

oochie

Agreed. I dont usually buy it but got the pre oxegen edition hoping for some help and guidance in deciding who id go and see there. i had heard they published a full line-up with all the official times... they didnt have this(had to rely on boards.ie to get a line-up). They actually had f*ck all about oxegen, just a ****ty booklet with the names of some of the bands playin. really missed the boat on irelands biggest music event of the summer. A poor magazine overall. needs to be freshened up. whats the story with its size too!! so akward

GerryManderer

For such a "right-on" publication, it's the most advertising-focused money machine available on the Irish market. The likes of VIP have more interesting actual content in them. Those free booklets are nothing more than little sponsorship manifestos.

Bard

Magazine?

Pfft. Web site.

Dick Darlington

and a magazine with a website that costs E20, Based on the mag being rubbish if it was free people prob wouldn't go to it let alone if it's E20, the Q website is a brilliant music website, not just a website for a mag but a great music 1 and it's free with 40 samples of recommended songs every month, that's a music mag !

goo

I don't think much of either. In my experience, music sites that are just music sites are usually far better. NME is good for news, though.

dead air

Hot Press is literally 20% music. I still buy it occasionally to read in work, although I was bitterly dissapointed with their "full oxegen report" in the last issue. Now and again you get the odd decent article but there's never enough to warrant buying it every fortnight.

Smurfpiss

I got a theory bout hot press and oxegen. actually its a bit of a no brainer. the reason their oxegen special sucked ass and had sweet **** all info was all cause of zedfm. niall stokes who part owns it with the d1ck bob geldof recently sued the BCI for giving phantom the alt radio licence thus delaying their launch. im sure you're all aware of the situation anyway. and you're also probably aware that MCD financed the phantom operation. Now seeing as there was a hot press tent last year at oxegen but absolutely nothing this year, and that there is one at the electric picnic (aiken promotions' baby) it seems MCD quite rightly told hot press to go stuff it up their already occupied arses. good thing too.... i swear to god ive read socialist college news articles written better than that durge. and i go to maynooth ffs. id buy the magazine for music, not for self important rants about society. give me a bloody break. but even then they are so bloody out of touch they may as well be smash hits.

Sweetness!

I agree ^^^^^^

Dick Darlington

I did promo work for them about 2yrs ago during the Heineken Green Energy Festival. They got me and a bunch of other students to work for a few days and they said we could then pick any ticket to a Heineken Green Energy gig we wanted, exvept Morrissey cause he was already sold out, but it was ok cause there was still loads of cool bands, Supergrass, Primal Scream, Iggy Pop.

In the end we were "given" tickets to a band in Whelans we never heard of, tickets were only about E10, compared to the couple of days work we did lugging Green Energy supplements to pubs/clubs etc. It was also pretty clear there were never really any other tickets available. :eek:
After that incident, which was actually lying to get us to do some work, I wouldn't give them the time of day.

Rockiemalt

they are the biggest bunch of incompetent tossers in the world... aside from the whole zed fm fiasco that smurfpiss mentioned above that magazine is suitable for one thing.... cat litter tray liner

Kingsize

Check out the Evening herald as the answer to the original question.
another fu<king rag "written" by incompetent self important cocks
why is pat kenny still in gainful employment??
you know??
its a great little country really.!!

Kingsize

Smurfpiss wrote:

they may as well be smash hits.

At least smash hits was doing its job properly & had no pretensions!!
gimme smash hits any day it was always a much more important music publication than hot press.
as for all the "self important rants about society" & other namby socialist student mag type crap.
theyve hardly got the moral high ground with all the ads for sexlines & escorts in the classifieds section.

Theremin

At one point Hotpress used to be good/relevant, but Stokes has no integrity to speak of. Westlife/Corrs etc. on the cover ffs. Total disrespect for the magazine's supposed target audience. The only people who still read it are probably those late teen girls who think the Frames are the best band in the world and feel the need to communicate that 'fact' by shouting the word 'amazing' right in my f**king ear when I'm trying to have a pint.

Don't get me wrong - I don't hate the Frames in particular, just their naive 'oh, it was such a spiritual experience. Glen (all on first name terms with him) has such an amazing voice. An amazing show' f**kwit groupie fans.

The Frames and Hotpress and their fans/readers are just symptoms of a wider problem: music as lifestyle/fashion. People who listen to music like some tools wear charity armbands for no other reason than they 'like, look cool'.

Executive Steve

you'd think all their original target audience would be long dead by now... i suppose for people in the countryside with no television radio or internet might find it a useful guide to wht was cool about a decade ago, and sure grannies who pick it up at a hairdressers in Ballygobackwards might still think its cutting edge reportage...

Tyrrial

i have no respect for hotpress and i don't really have anything to say that hasn't already been said. so i'll just scrape the bottom of the barrell with an old fasioned one:

HOTPRESS BLOWS GOATS


yup.. i think that did the job.

skregs

if you like Hotpress, you have terrible taste in music

eskimo

I applied to be a Hotpress student rep back in september. Going to a small college, I was probably the only one to apply, and they took me on.

My first task was to stand in college handing out a "free" issue to everyone - "free" i.e. copies of an old issue they hadn't managed to sell. Some people didn't even know what HP was, others said it was a **** magazine, and others took it and left them lying all around the canteen after lunch.

Second task was to visit at least 5 newsagents every two weeks and A)make sure they had enough copies of the magazine B)make sure the magazine was in a prominent position and C)give the shop posters of the magazine-cover to hang up on their window, this being the biggest load of bull**** since no self-respecting newsagent allows random magazines to hang up pictures of themselves on their shop windows - and accordingly, every shop I asked refused me. This is something they wanted me to do every two weeks for the next 12 months. I did it twice, and gave up.

I took on the task because as a young person who began to take an interest in and appreciate home-grown music about 2 years ago, HotPress seemed the closest thing I could get to all the info I desired on Irish bands and musicians. Yet, nowadays it's not very often you see an Irish person on the cover - unless, of course, it's Bono, Bob Geldof, or Gary from Snow Patrol. Or Sinead O'Connor making another comeback, á la Hotpress. But, sin é. It's pitiful. It's laughable. It's damn stupid!

By now, I've lost all interest in the magazine, despite the fact that it still arrives every two weeks in my letter box - i.e. the one year's free subscription that as a student rep they forced on me - and every two weeks I spend less time flicking through it.

It's sad because it could do so much good for Irish music. It seems to have given up on that and instead sold its soul to a demand for info on international people.

Well, Hotpress, you can feck off, coz Irish music doesn't want you any more if you're gonna carry on like that!

And don't get me started on those page-fillers they use in a desparate attempt to gain political respect by the public they call "articles". Pffff.

Smurfpiss

eskimo makes a good point. they basically only put the faces of bands whos records have gone platnium on the cover, regardless of their quality. so we countlessly see issues with the thrills, u2, damien rice frames and westlife. Now don't get me wrong, i like damo, and frames old music is good, but jesus they're not somebody ya wanna read bout, they're just tossers. We should have some kind of print rag that focuses on decent, smaller acts and doesnt sell out for the pop ****e like the corrs. tho i probably wouldn't buy it anyway.

nlgbbbblth

Dick Darlington wrote:

It's such a bad mag !
The mistakes they make were unbelieveable from the article where they discussed why "the fly" was left off U2's best of (it was on it)

The Fly does not feature on the US Edition of The Best Of 1990 - 2000

ergo

have to say I agree with almost everything written

and the whole Stokes crowd delaying Phantom's launch and leaving them in complete limbo was the final straw

I used to buy HP religiously around 1994-1995 maybe 1996 era, I was young etc and it seemed cool and Ireland was very different then

people talk about HP fawning over the Frames but it has to be said, when the Frames had just made Fitzcarraldo or Dance the Devil (still probably their finest moments) HP weren't exactly falling over themselves to cover the Frames, just when they really needed them

nowadays I'd skim through HP in Eason's or Tower, don't want to give any money to Stokes and his crowd, and 10 minutes is normally long enough tbh

also Westlife etc on the cover I mean FFS

Kingsize

Jackie hayden wouldnt reconise a decent demo if it came up behind him & anally raped him,he would however write a small novella detailing how he learned to cope with the harrowing experience complete with pictures.

Having said that Sex correspondant ANNE SEXTON has done wonders for my premature ejaculation,one look at her picture turns me right off !!

Dick Darlington

Now if only they'd read all these posts

Robbo

I buy it on a semi-regular basis purely for comedy reasons. That Anne Sexton is about as risqué as Nora Batty and I've seen sexier stuff written by Alistair Campell.

smackbunnybaby

Kingsize wrote:

Jackie hayden wouldnt reconise a decent demo if it came up behind him & anally raped him,he would however write a small novella detailing how he learned to cope with the harrowing experience complete with pictures.

Having said that Sex correspondant ANNE SEXTON has done wonders for my premature ejaculation,one look at her picture turns me right off !!

rotflmfao

that is the funniest thing i have ever read........

Dick Darlington

Just a reminder it hasn't gotten any better

eskimo

Dick Darlington wrote:

Just a reminder it hasn't gotten any better

Why do we need a reminder?

Robbo

eskimo wrote:

Why do we need a reminder?

Because - much like 9-11 - if we forget just how awful Hot Press is, al-Qaeda will win.

John

Stay dead goddamnit!