Playing Taps for Music Magazines

Slate.com blogs about the difficulties that music magazines are having surviving (or not), and the author -- a veteran of defunct music rag Blender -- offers his three reasons for their demise:

• Too few superstars, and all the magazines cover the same ones.
• Music magazines have lost their access to the top stars and previews of music, so there's less reason for fans to read them.
• Social networking has stolen the audiences.

I personally think his first and third reasons are minor and uninteresting. After all, music magazines that want to be mass market best sellers have to prostitute themselves to the flavor of the month to make sure they eet their rate base; but what makes a music magazine -- or any other genre-specific magazine, such as science fiction films or politics -- a must-buy for readers is when it helps find the up-and-coming or overlooked artist/film/book/thinker and puts that person on the cover. So stop whining.

But the second reason probably indicates more of what's wrong with the music magazines and how they've stopped knowing how to serve their audiences. They are not the only publishers who have lost their niche exclusivity; back in the 1970s and early 1980s, science fiction films and television programs were almost completely the purview of SF magazines, which could get all kinds of access to filmmakers and authors that fans could not find elsewhere. But as SF became more of a mainstream success and as traditional media chased pop culture to lure audiences, even mainstream publications were putting out special Star Trek issues and featuring Battlestar Galactica on their covers. That's great news for the fan; but it obviously created a big challenge to the niche publications that were selling their access and now had to start selling their unique outlook and any value-added content related to the media.

The same, I think, is true of music magazines. Rolling Stone has always mixed politics in heavy doses, as did Spin from its early years. But politics and artist interviews and concert photos and all the rest aren't enough to keep feeding big audiences.

Music magazines, in my humble opinion, are niche magazines and should be operated like such. The MBAs running them don't want to hear that their natural market probably limits them to 100,000 or 200,000 circulation ceilings, but, as I keep saying on this blog, that's a great opportunity for smaller, entrepreneurial publishers and investors to come in and play where the big guys no longer can.

Niche Magazine Markets Rule

In a statement that should give hope to small magazine publishers, Ben Greenman, a novelist and an editor at The New Yorker, tells a Media Bistro podcast that people will be willing to pay for niche content. He cited New Yorker editor David Remnick's belief that niche audiences – and they consider New Yorker's literate audience to be a large niche audience – "seek out content, and they are willing to spend time on it, and — despite what the 15-year-old says — when they have money, they are willing to spend money on [your content]."

The "15-year-old" to whom he refers is an intern at a UK financial institution who was asked to provide a report on the consumption habits of teens. He surveyed his friends and reported back that teenagers don't read newspapers (duh), don't use Twitter (if true, it's to their credit), don't use the phone (exceedingly doubtful), and use their game consoles to communicate. This sent a shock though the business community (or, for a non-Rupert Murdoch-owned source, see here), which apparently is still just getting up to speed on how to spell Twitter -- and now they're being told it's old hat. (The term "old hat" is old hat, BTW.)


Other thoughts that come out of this:
* They have a 15-year-old intern? Isn't that too young and kind of creepy?
* If teenagers aren't reading, can we please stop gearing all content toward them?
* If teenagers aren't using phones, then someone should tell the junior high school teachers I know who deal with their students calling and texting all day long. If they're not communicating with their friends and family, what are they doing? Trading stocks and bonds?
* Are UK business people so out of touch that they're really amazed at all this?

But, to bring this back to Mr. Greenman, it is at least a (probably unreliable) indicator that publishers who are relying on mass market media products to reach the young and easily distracted are probably wasting a lot of money. What they need to do is use the niche markets where the young and easily distracted are spending their time and where they have invested some trust, and that's where they should advertise the hell out of their products or services. This, again, is good news to small magazines and web site and online services that cater to relatively narrow markets and do it well.