Since then, The Wire's coverage has included experimental rock, electronica, alternative hip hop, modern classical, free improvisation, nu jazz and traditional music.

[1] Its embrace of high-minded, literate criticism aligned it with publications such as New Statesman, a politics and culture magazine that started to publish pieces by rock journalists, and Melody Maker, which had hired a group of academically oriented new writers like Simon Reynolds who were influenced by post-structuralism.

[9] The Wire was considered one of the most significant independently owned publications covering the musical underground in the 2000s, alongside Fact, Rock-A-Rolla, Dusted and innumerable blogs.

[14] In an introductory essay explaining the magazine's editorial policy and scope, Wood wrote that The Wire intended to target the demographic of listeners under the age of 25, who he felt were poorly served by the state of jazz writing in Britain.

[19] Reflecting on the early years as part of the Namara Group, Tony Herrington said: I think they thought it would be good to have a magazine to support Quartet's jazz titles.

Competition among weeklies like NME, Melody Maker and Sounds heightened in the 1980s, and these publications began to prioritise circulation, advertising and commercial appeal, which resulted in editorial constraint.

The Wire did not impose significant editorial demands or stylistic revisions on its writers and, as such, it became an attractive publication for freelancers who had started their careers at UK weeklies during the post-punk era.

As editor, Cook refurbished The Wire so it would seem stylish and appealing to the new wave of British jazz hipsters, but he increasingly steered the magazine toward a pluralistic, multi-genre approach.

[22] The Wire also began to develop a house style that tended toward the philosophical and cerebral, printing "articles peppered with references to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, or Jacques Attali's monograph Noise.

[n 2][26] The formerly jazz-focused magazine's covers in this period featured decidedly non-jazz artists like Michael Jackson, Prince, Philip Glass, John Lee Hooker and Van Morrison; meanwhile, articles published inside the magazine profiled a broad range of musicians, including Elvis Costello, Stravinsky, Mozart, Frank Zappa, Prokofiev, Bob Marley and Haydn.

"[23] John Fordham, the jazz critic for The Guardian, credited Cook with "transforming [The Wire's] content and design and opening out a specialised, sometimes uninviting publication" to a broader audience.

[28] British-Ghanaian writer Kodwo Eshun pointed to "Black Science Fiction", an essay by Sinker from the February 1992 issue, as a major influence on Afrofuturism, a term that was coined the following year.

I wanted (he writes with ten-year hindsight) an alert, funny journal which cruised its readers, chafed and teased and englamoured and thrilled and hurt and baffled and fucked with them—a space for speculative playful malicious unfrightened imagination which when it vanished (any moment, we all thought) left a questing shadow behind the heart.

[25]Sinker's vision—later characterised as "a thorny, quizzical, fanzine cum proto-Weblog"—clashed with then-publisher Adele Yaron's ideal of "a sleek and stylish urban music 'n' lifestyle monthly".

[25] While Sinker's stint as editor was brief and controversial, music writers have praised his editorial decisions in retrospect and highlighted his influence on the magazine's future directions.

[32] Throughout the decade, Reynolds also contributed a series of essays on post-rave trends in UK dance music, covering jungle, drum 'n' bass, hardstep, neurofunk and 2-step garage.

These essays culminated in his theorizing of the "hardcore continuum": a diverse, ever-evolving tradition of electronic dance music that had diverged from American-born house and techno to become a distinctly British style.

[35] The six permanent members of the staff—Herrington, Young, Chris Bohn, Ben House, Anne Hilde Neset and Andy Tait—purchased the company on 21 December 2000 and announced the sale in the February 2001 issue.

Apart from the numerous album reviews every month, the magazine has features such as "The Invisible Jukebox", an interview conducted by way of unknown tracks being played to an artist, and "The Primer", an in-depth article on a genre or act.

In recent years, the magazine has published work by photographers like Nigel Shafran, Todd Hido, Tom Hunter, Pieter Hugo, Alec Soth, Clare Shilland, Leon Chew, Jake Walters, Juan Diego Valera, Michael Schmelling, Mark Peckmezian, and Takashi Homma.

In Newman's opinion, Elliman and Ward produced "some of the most beautiful and remarkable magazine covers of that (or any) era, timeless designs that still look strikingly contemporary today.

[55] A major redesign was completed in 2001 by Non-Format, a design team composed of Kjell Ekhorn and Jon Forss, who were working out of an office next to The Wire.

[58] At first, Ekhorn and Forss created custom layouts and typographies in nearly every issue, rather than relying on standardised templates for features; however, this became too much work, and they eventually settled on using a single style across several months at a time.

[60] David Jury praised Non-Format's designs, writing that the magazine "retained an identity all its own through its creative use of experimental headline fonts, white space and excellent photography.

[63] Guardian columnist Maggoty Lamb commented in 2007 that The Wire has "the annual best-of list most likely to single out an ensemble called Kiss the Anus of the Black Cat as having made 'one of the most interesting records of the year'.

"[n 4][65] When the magazine named James Ferraro's vaporwave album Far Side Virtual its 2011 Release of the Year, Eric Grandy remarked in Seattle Weekly that it was "[n]o surprise that willfully obscurantist British rag the Wire's Best of 2011 list is topped by James Ferraro's winking Windows '97 soft-rock hellscape ... and further ranges from the Beach Boys' Smile Sessions to Laurel Halo and Hype Williams.

Gail Brennan at The Sydney Morning Herald opined in 1993 that The Wire "covers a surprising range of music while bringing a narrow and contrived 'punk' attitude to bear.

After institutionalizing the annoying Euro catchphrase 'electronica', lapping up everything DJ Spooky ever mumbled, and trashing rock-damaged Americans for not inducting Lamonte Young [sic] into the Baseball Hall of Fame, they just keep on droning.

[73] Rather than delving deeper into the genre's radical political dimensions, Watson argued, The Wire has instead curated its noise coverage based on superficial trends of underground fashionability; he suggested that the writing may sometimes provide "a clue as to how some new crew of hopeless hairy Stateside noisemaker muffins have been selected: 'Thurston says they're okay...'.

This 'Fear of Avant' leads to the style of reviewing which pervades The Wire, where music is described like some exotic landscape the writer has witnessed from train or plane—they played high frazzles, then low drones, chucked in some steam engine samples, then did some drumming—with value judgments suspended.