Tag Archives: Team Rock

As if 2016 wasn’t already an utterly dreadful year, now comes the news that Team Rock, publishers of Classic Rock, Metal Hammer and Prog magazines has gone into administration with the loss of 73 jobs, a week before Christmas.

If a buyer cannot be found and these titles cease publication it will be devastating blow not just for music writing but also for those genres of music ill-served by the rest of the British music press. It was host to many talented writers passionate about the sorts of music the mainstream media tended to dismiss as unfashionable and irrelevant.

You’d never catch any of their writers filing a Pseud’s Corner style piece about production line pop extruded for twelve-year-olds. Let’s hope they all land on their feet.

I hope something of Team Rock survives. For many of those bands who appear regularly on this blog, Prog Magazine in particular was the only national high street print publication that was ever likely to feature them. Yes, there are limited-circulation subscription-only magazines and many specialist bloggers, but nobody else has a fraction of Prog’s reach. I know I’ve been critical of Prog in the past, and questioned whether having one and only one powerful gatekeeper was healthy for the scene in the long term, but their loss will still leave a huge hole, and the bands will inevitably suffer from the loss of the exposure they brought.