Muzik Is Dead-Official

Specialist club magazine Muzik is closing down just over 8 years after launching in a blaze of sunshine at Tribal Gathering's 1995 event.

The monthly IPC title helped bring dance music to a worldwide mainstream audience though in recent years struggled as the corporate club scene it helped create began to implode.

"Once dance music takes on a role outside of its own hardcore culture and starts playing with mass pop culture you will inevitably get burned," former editor Conor McNicholas told Skrufff, just after he quit the title to take over NME last June.

"Pop-commercial trance peaked in the summer of 2000. It made a lot of people a lot of money and inevitably a lot of that cash trickled down to lots of other people in the industry. It was fun, it was a great party, but now we're having the hangover."

"Fashion moves on and demands new things and the industry didn't move fast enough," he continued.

"Too many people were taking the old promoter attitude of milking the market for as much as they could before things collapsed, which of course they inevitably did. There wasn't enough experimentation, development of new sounds, new nights, investment in the future."

As well as attempting to invent countless new genres, the title always enjoyed knocking them down just as gleefully, though recent issues had significantly improved, despite questionable cover stars like kareoke king Justin Timberlake and Puff Daddy.

"We have a very talented and dedicated team on Muzik, and I want to thank them all for their hard work and their grace under pressure," said Tim Brooks, managing director of IPC ignite (also responsible for NME) in a press release issued this week.

"Sadly, nothing they could do in isolation was going to turn around this sector of the music market."
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