Here‘s something for use in the current discussion about the ‘state’ of the music journalism business.

On the Plan B forum, it prompted me to say that hating the NME was the new hating ‘manufactured chart pop’, even if that’s not strictly true. After a cursory glance at this week’s issue to find the tracklisting to the free CD I found a feature in which it said Annie* was going to ‘save the charts from all those Pop Idol wannabes’. If you want to refer back to Mr McNicholas’ article about bumping Franz Ferdinand (Take Me Out, No. 3 in the UK Charts) off the cover for The Streets (No. 1 album and single in the UK charts) then so be it…

*before you click on that, be aware get a horrible loop with faux-pounding bassbins and a smidgen of Timberlake in a sidebar advert for McDonalds. You can turn it off though. Just thought you might be interested. I know they’d cut word counts but this is ridiculous.