About Q

Q

Q was a British monthly popular music magazine published in London from October 1986 to July 2020. For thirty-four years it occupied a distinctive place in the British music press, between the weekly newspapers such as NME and Melody Maker and the specialist heritage titles that followed it. It combined long interviews, an extensive reviews section and high production values, and for much of its life it was one of the most commercially successful music magazines in the United Kingdom.

The magazine was founded by broadcast journalists Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, who had presented the BBC television music series The Old Grey Whistle Test. It was published first by EMAP and, from 2008, by the Bauer Media Group. Its final print issue, Q415, was dated July 2020 and published on 28 July 2020. A short-lived online revival followed in 2023 and 2024, after which the title ceased operating again.

Founding and the idea behind the magazine

Ellen and Hepworth founded Q because they believed the existing music press was ignoring an older generation of music buyers. The compact disc was then still a new technology, and listeners who had grown up with rock and pop in the 1960s and 1970s were buying albums in the new format without a magazine that spoke directly to them. The success of veteran performers at Live Aid, which Ellen and Hepworth had co-presented, underlined the size and loyalty of that audience.

The magazine was originally to be called Cue, in the sense of cueing a record ready to play. The name was changed to avoid confusion with a snooker magazine, and the magazine's 200th edition offered a second explanation: a single-letter title would stand out more prominently on newsstands. In its early years it carried the subtitle describing itself as a modern guide to music and more, signalling that it intended to cover popular culture a little more broadly than a narrow record magazine.

Format, reviews and production values

From the start Q set itself apart through monthly production and higher standards of photography and printing than the weekly music press. Where the ink weeklies were printed cheaply and quickly, Q was a glossy monthly designed to be kept, with longer features planned over weeks rather than days.

Its reviews section became one of its defining features. It covered new releases, reissues and compilations, as well as film, live concerts, radio and television in its earlier years, and each review carried a rating from one to five stars. Much of the magazine was devoted to interviews with popular music artists, often at greater length than rival titles allowed. It also compiled lists, ranging from greatest-album polls to rankings of the richest stars in rock, and in July 2004 it published a special edition devoted to rock lists. Special editions devoted to single artists such as U2 and Nirvana appeared until 2018.

Readers, gifts and the spine line

Q frequently offered promotional gifts, including cover-mounted CDs and books. The January 2006 issue, for example, included a free miscellany modelled on a popular book of general knowledge. Readers also noticed a smaller running joke: each issue carried a different message on its spine, and some readers tried to work out how the message related to the contents. The practice, known as the spine line, later became common among British lifestyle magazines, including Q's sister title Empire.

In its early tone the magazine was closer to Rolling Stone than to the weeklies, though with humour inherited from Smash Hits, where some of its staff had worked. Tom Hibbert's interview feature, which talked to figures well outside music as well as to musicians, and the magazine's film reviews were part of that broader mix. After EMAP launched Empire in 1989 as a film counterpart, film coverage migrated there and Q concentrated more purely on music.

The Britpop years and the 1990s

During the 1990s Q shifted its focus towards Britpop and indie rock, the dominant British guitar music of the decade. Former NME writers including Andrew Collins, Danny Kelly, Stuart Maconie and Charles Shaar Murray joined established Q writers such as Paul Du Noyer, and the magazine balanced serious long-form journalism with deliberately tongue-in-cheek features about celebrity and band life.

The magazine also had a close relationship with the Glastonbury Festival, producing a free daily newspaper on site during the festival and a review magazine afterwards. That operation had begun as a spin-off of Select magazine; when EMAP decided it did not need two monthly titles covering the same ground, Select closed in late 2000 and Q continued. Its coverage of the period made it, for many readers, the mainstream record of Britpop's rise and aftermath.

The Q Awards and other brands

Q held an annual awards ceremony, the Q Awards, in London from 1990 until 2019. The awards became a fixture of the British music calendar, honouring both contemporary artists and veteran performers, and they ended only when the magazine itself closed.

The brand extended beyond print. Q TV, a television channel, launched on 2 October 2000 and closed on 3 July 2012. Q Radio launched as a full-service station in June 2008, with Coldplay giving an exclusive interview to its flagship programme on launch day. The station moved from London to Birmingham in 2009 and closed in mid-2013, when its owner used its capacity to launch another station. These extensions showed how far a magazine brand could be stretched in the multichannel era, even as the economics of print were weakening.

Ownership change and a changing market

In January 2008 EMAP sold its consumer magazine titles, including Q, to the Bauer Media Group. The sale placed Q alongside its sister magazine Mojo, which EMAP had launched in the 1990s and which increasingly served the heritage and classic-rock audience that Q had originally been created to reach. In late 2008 Q revamped its design, reducing the amount of text and increasing its focus on subjects beyond music.

The wider market, however, was moving against all print music titles. In February 2012 Andrew Harrison became editor, replacing Paul Rees, after circulation had fallen by 17 percent in half a year to 64,596. Under Harrison the magazine launched an iPad edition and was named Magazine of the Year at the 2012 Record of the Day awards, but he left after fourteen months as print titles continued to struggle against blogs and online platforms. By the period from July to December 2015, the audited circulation had fallen to 44,050 for print and digital editions combined.

Criticism and controversies

Q was never without critics. In its early years NME writer Steven Wells mocked it as a magazine that made it acceptable to like Dire Straits, a charge that captured its deliberate distance from weekly notions of cool. During the Britpop rivalry of the mid-1990s, Q revised its assessment of Blur's album The Great Escape after Oasis's rival album proved more commercially successful, and it was unusual among music magazines in apologising for its original review.

Later criticism focused on caution. The trade magazine Campaign argued in 2008 that Q had been criticised for playing safe in its reviews and cover choices. Musicians occasionally complained publicly, including complaints that the magazine would not cover a band despite favourable reviews, and sharp remarks made by a musician who had just accepted one of its awards. Such disputes were themselves evidence of the magazine's gatekeeping power: artists cared about its verdicts because its readers still bought records on the strength of them.

Closure in 2020

Bauer put Q up for sale in May 2020, during a restructuring driven by the coronavirus pandemic, alongside several non-music titles. A special collector's issue, Q414, compiled material from across the magazine's history and was intended as a possible farewell. No buyer for the music title was found, although another publisher bought some of Bauer's non-music magazines.

Editor Ted Kessler, who had held the post since 2017, announced the closure on 20 July 2020. In his final editor's letter he apologised for failing to keep the magazine afloat, described a lean operation that had used various survival measures in an extremely challenging print market, and said that Covid-19 had wiped those efforts out. The final issue, Q415, published on 28 July 2020, compiled celebrated interviews from the magazine's archive, including conversations with David Bowie, Joni Mitchell and Prince. Commentators in The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph treated the closure as a landmark in the decline of the old British music press.

The online revival and final end

The Q brand was later sold to Empire Media Group. It was soft-launched as an online publication in November 2023, publishing new material alongside archive articles, and officially relaunched in January 2024 with editors based in Los Angeles and Oxford. The revival was short-lived: in May 2024 the magazine ceased operations and six full-time journalists were laid off.

That second ending confirmed what the 2020 closure had already shown. Q had been built for a world in which a glossy monthly could mediate between artists and an older, album-buying audience, and in which reviews, lists and long interviews had scarcity value. Streaming, social media and free online criticism removed that scarcity. What survives is its archive of interviews and reviews, its awards history, and its role in documenting British and international popular music from the compact-disc boom through Britpop to the streaming age.