THERE'S no such thing as a big-circulation music magazine anymore. And those that still pretend that there is, such as Kerrang!and NME, are looking at circulation figures falling faster than their parent company's shares.

You can blame the interweb for a good deal for this but, more importantly, the dedicated music press is still sipping away in the Last Chance Saloon telling anyone who will listen that music remains a "niche" or "specialist" category. But it's not. Didn't the advertisers and marketing clip-board people told us years ago that music is now officially a "lifestyle" product and there was nothing we could do about it.

There won't be any dedicated big-selling music titles in the near future, which is why most of them are shoring up their non-print activities (radio stations, live events, record companies etc), with the print part of the operation acting merely as a portal.

The daily press long ago took away the music magazine's rasion d'etre, and because of their long lead-in time, music mags often find themselves gambling on what to cover and how to cover it. Even their old speciality - "We spent two weeks on the road with The Rolling Stones" - has fallen victim to the exactitudes imposed by the music PROs.

The latest music magazine to "close", the monthly rock mag Q, didn't even make the news. That's because it didn't officially close as such, but quietly rebranded itself as a "lifestyle" magazine.

With a circulation drop of more than 13 per cent last year, the magazine that launched in 1986 (and was going to be called Cue until the publishers realised that it might be confused for a snooker magazine) has put the final spike on its reams of album reviews and never-ending music-related lists. In come film, sport, radio, gadgets and even a TV column. There's still music; it's just that it's placed beside a new Q Hero slot (first subject: Barack Obama) and the Q Challenge (a journalist goes out and about dressed up as AC/DC's Angus Young and sees what reaction he gets)

For Qeditor Paul Rees, the new Qis trying to do for music/lifestyle magazines what Top Gearhas done for car programmes.

" Qis for people who like music but like other things as well," he says. "It's like Top Gear. I know nothing about cars, but that is unmissable. They can take something that's about cars and put a different spin on it. We want to do that with music."

There is the perception that Qlost its way when it started chasing after the "cool". Qis for REM and Coldplay fans - grime artists were never going to appeal to them. Whether in the daily print or magazine world, survey after survey shows that people are far more likely to read something about a known name (this figure shoots up to almost 100 per cent if the reader already has an album by said known name). They don't want to read about "a promising new electro-pop duo from Ohio" unless they're given a very good reason to.

It's understood that Qwill have a film star on its front cover within the next two issues (most likely Clint Eastwood). Trade insiders are already rather dramatically saying that this will signify that the mass-circulation music magazine press is dead.

For Q, this "new emphasis on other forms of entertainment, including films" is supposed to shore up existing readers and add new ones. In its old incarnation it was a brand leader of sorts. In its new one, it becomes just another glossy mag to be racked alongside innumerable rivals. But for a music magazine that sold itself on its front-cover music story, swiftly falling circulation figures meant their "us first" demand on the music PR world was loosening.

Anyway, "lifestyle coverage" is the new grunge.