Popworld Pulp(ed) magazine. How could they have got it so wrong?

Despite a year in the planning, and ticks in all the market research boxes, music magazine Popworld Pulp has closed after just two issues.

Press Gazette has the story.

The scale of the disaster is stunning. They were aiming for 60,000 sales a week and got 9,000. They printed a staggering 130,000 copies of the first issue.

The mag was a spin-off of Channel 4 TV show, Popworld, but how could publishers Brooklands have misjudged the market so?

Brooklands quoted Chief Exec Darren Styles in their news release

“How anybody under the age of 25 consumes music and the music media has changed profoundly in the past few years”

Too right Mr Styles, they don’t read music magazines for a start. Thumbs up for noticing that they’re on places like MySpace, and following them there, but why publish an another media form when there is already a Popworld website, that’s a great deal more like the show they already know, as well as countless other niche music sites.

This blog entry also discusses reasons why it couldn’t work, accurately predicting a failure, seeing as it was written with the launch of the first issue last week (although generously giving it till the end of the year to fold).