The Day The Music Magazine Died?
- April 21st, 2008
- 2 Comments
While I love music, I’m not really enough of a fan to be a regular reader of music magazines. Just as some people would say they read Playboy “for the articles,” I read Rolling Stone and SPIN for the non-music political features. Crains just ran an article about the sketchy state of music magazines and how many of them have seen sharp declines in ad revenue. From the article:
Ad pages for the three biggest music magazines slid 26% in the first quarter. Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, the category’s iconic publication, saw a 33% drop, according to just-released numbers from Publishers Information Bureau.
The magazines are reeling from the same seismic shift that has rocked the record labels—and which has made popular music more available to consumers than ever before.
Young fans are filling their iPod and Zune libraries straight from the Internet, which is also where they can listen to music and catch the latest news and reviews.
What I found interesting was this notion that even though things are bad, they’re not as bad as what’s happened in the teen magazine space (i.e. magazines closing). Still, in some ways, I think there is way more competition from online for music than from celebrity/fashion blogs or other sites that have been eating away at teen magazines’ readership.
Blender’s publisher Ben Madden argues “They need a credible guide. Nothing online can be that guide.” I’m not buying it. Between the top music blogs (that are able to break news faster), especially those in the indie space like Stereogum and Pitchfork (which both launched video content recently), I think there will be a teen magazine-like shakeout in the music mag space. It’s not just blogs, you have all the social networks wanting to launch music services, which will link artist pages with fans and their own ugc around artists. What do you think?
Before the world wide web, I would buy music magazines which would talk about bands I’d never heard.
The authors would try to describe a band’s sound with just-words when 10 seconds of audio would be so much clearer than a thousand words.
Now, we can sample audio of a band instantly on the web.
I don’t know abut you guys but if I want breaking stories and features, mtv.com/news is the source. Up to the minute, blogging and now the addition of comments on all stories. Very interesting.
As for the comparison to the mags and record labels, I do agree. Magazines are force feeding us the same crappy bands and recycled articles that the labels do.
The reason myspace gets the page views for the music world is because they are right now and I can change the channel to anything I want at any given time and get songs, news, blogs, comments or anything else that comes along in an ugly 1-page spread. So yea, when magazines start taking chances, I’ll go back and read them. If they continue to put hearthrob’s that a record label picked out on their covers, then no, I’ll just look online and search till I find what I’m looking for.
Long rant I know, but I used to be the biggest reader of all music mags from XXL and the Source to Fader and XLR8. Now, its filled with irrelevant ads from companies wanting to cash in, the problem is that their audience has left and moved online.
Too bad.