Off Licence — affectionately known as Offie Mag — is a print and online platform headquartered in Brighton that covers underground music, photography, and culture in the UK. The magazine began as a website in 2017 and published two sold-out print editions, with many of its retailers being actual off-licences — a distribution strategy that tells you everything about the magazine's relationship to its audience and its sense of humour.
The editorial focus is on the underground: the bands, the venues, the photographers, and the cultural scenes that exist below the radar of mainstream music media. Off Licence documents this world with the affection and insider knowledge of people who spend their evenings in the venues they write about and their mornings developing the photographs they took there.
Selling a music magazine in an off-licence is either a brilliant marketing strategy or a beautifully logical choice — the Venn diagram of people who buy independent music magazines and people who pop into an offie for a bottle of wine on a Friday evening is, one suspects, almost a perfect circle.