Rewind Magazine

Rewind Magazine (also known as RWD or rwdmag) is a British based magazine which features news, interviews and charts on hip hop, RnB, UK garage, Drum and bass and US house music. It is released monthly, distributing 36,040 copies each time and is ABC certified. It considers itself the largest magazine on urban music and lifestyle in the United Kingdom.

As well as the magazine, Rewind Mag has a website which features music videos, tracks and artist profiles.

History

Rewind Magazine became a well known name in UK underground urban music circles in mid to late 2003. This coincided with the rise of a new urban music genre, which later became popularly referred to as Grime.

Rewind Magazine provided a platform for emerging unsigned artists to get their names and their faces into every popular underground music outlet. This works by aspiring artists paying to feature within the magazine. This may not seem very desirable at first, but the magazine's healthy distribution and circulation makes this more attractive. The magazine enjoys a relatively healthy distribution and circulation as readers can pick up the magazine for free.

This new platform (along with music channel Channel U TV) appealed to many aspiring artists from the grime scene and allowed them to do independently what they could have previously only done with the backing of a Major record label.

The popularity with the physical paper magazine soon spread online to its website. Its official website was buoyed by a popular forum, the most central point being the Grime Music Forum. This forum allows for the discussion of everything to do with the grime scene and regularly enjoys visits from big names in the Grime scene who occasionally also post.

Masterstepz/Ashley Cole scandal

In 2006, the "News of the World" and "The Sun" newspapers printed reports of a Premiership footballer and a music DJ engaged in a "homosexual orgy". Even though no names were mentioned, a pixellated photograph was printed. Within minutes of the story being printed, posters of RWD's whatever room, exposed the real unedited photograph of DJ Masterstepz, Ashley Cole and Jermaine Jenas. Cole sued the "News of the World" and "The Sun" newspapers for libel resulting in both the papers retracting the allegations and RWD forum being shutdown for some considerable time.

Recent history (2007 onwards)

In mid-2007, Rewind Magazine underwent a number of management changes, one of the most important being a change of editor. The new editor wanted to expand the magazine's audience in order to feature all types of music that might appeal to a younger generation. In order to achieve this, the content and appearance of the magazine and website changed, much to the disappointment of the users. This resulted in an exodus of users, establishing their own forums. Users from the Rewind 'Whatever', 'Sports' & 'Games' section headed over to a new forum named ViP2.

External links

* [http://www.rwdmag.com RWD Mag Official Site]