RWD 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 U.S. house music. It is released monthly, distributing 98,300 copies each time and is ABC certified. It's considered the largest magazine on urban music and lifestyle in the United Kingdom.
As well as the magazine, RWDmag has a website which features music videos, tracks and artist profiles.
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RWD 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. Founding editor-in-chief was Matt Mason, who later wrote The Pirate's Dilemma (2008).[1]
RWD 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.
RWD Magazine recently celebrated 100 issues.
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.
In mid-2007, RWD 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; namely ViP2 Forum which evolved from the Flashback993 forums that was established in 2005. Grime Forum was also created where grime music fans who used to post in the RWDMag forum created their own forum website named Grime Forum with its own connected "Grimepedia" encyclopedia of the genre as well as a music store.
On 1 April 2009 RWD launched a new and redesigned website with extended content under the different genres and enhanced social networking features which give users the ability to manage their own profiles, keep in touch with friends, as well as track forum activity. The functionality behind this was carried out by atticmedia and the design by alex donne (aka vector meldrew)