Okay, what I'm saying applied more directly to Vibe...
It's like through marketing studies, Vibe came up with what they treated as archetypal but in reality was more a fabrication of its ideal hip-hop persona...with its pros: educated, hard-working, liberal, sensitive, and its cons: consumer-driven, having an insatiable need to follow trends rather than blaze their own, etc. And the treatment was if you weren't already just like this person that you should strive to be like said person.
Yet, how many actually fit within those parameters?
Vibe was a crock of shit in that it pretended 75% of its viable audience away. Again, this was done with good intentions...to set the bar high or some shit like that. But instead, all it really did was patronize instead of inspire. Sure, it had its worth for many...but so too does People Magazine.
It was founded by Quincy Jones and Time Warner. I mean, Time Warner is about as corporate as it gets. That's like expecting from-the-heart media from MTV.
But the point is, 1990's Vibe was good IN SPITE OF Time Warner. Not BECAUSE OF it.
I don't know how many of you actually saw the mag back in 1992-96, but the mag actually had some substance then.
Now...if Vibe had started out the way it wound up, THEN I'd be all like: "well, what do you expect? It's no better and no worse than everything else."
But early Vibe was intelligent without being bourgie. At some point the master plan got fucked up, and the next thing you know, the mag became an illiterate gossip rag.
I hate to say it, but there has always been a serious lack of intelligent soul magazines in the US. Most of the ones I remember from back in the time were on the fan-mag tip. At one point Vibe went a long way towards correcting that, but those days ended long ago.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
Okay, what I'm saying applied more directly to Vibe...
It's like through marketing studies, Vibe came up with what they treated as archetypal but in reality was more a fabrication of its ideal hip-hop persona...with its pros: educated, hard-working, liberal, sensitive, and its cons: consumer-driven, having an insatiable need to follow trends rather than blaze their own, etc. And the treatment was if you weren't already just like this person that you should strive to be like said person.
Yet, how many actually fit within those parameters?
Vibe was a crock of shit in that it pretended 75% of its viable audience away. Again, this was done with good intentions...to set the bar high or some shit like that. But instead, all it really did was patronize instead of inspire. Sure, it had its worth for many...but so too does People Magazine.
It was founded by Quincy Jones and Time Warner. I mean, Time Warner is about as corporate as it gets. That's like expecting from-the-heart media from MTV.
But the same shit basically happened at every other magazine. Blaze, for instance did the same shit, came right out of the box and tried to concretely define what hip-hop was for all. It was no longer, this is me, this is what I know, and you can make of it what you wish. It became, we all got together and decided on every word in every piece together...and as Oliver cosigned, it made shit just too monolithic in of course a skewed way.
I'll take a poorly written article on a regionally hot artist in Murderdog over a well written piece on an already overexposed national act in Vibe or the Source or XXL or Fader or Blaze (and the same damn article was likely to be in each at the same time) any day of the week.
give me a gansgta writer who writes from a gangsta perspective, a woman writer who writes from a woman's perspective, a Mexcian writer who writes from a Mexican perspective, a gay writer who writes from a gay perspective
vs.
let them represent themselves as individuals
Well, which is it?
You already know what the I'm saying, smartypants. Not in the mood for games today.
It sounds like what you're saying is that you want writing that first and foremost represents a demographic--a single demographic, at that. Apart from the logistic idiocy of this suggestion (what's a Mexican gangster supposed to do? flip a coin?), it makes it sound like you value neither individuals nor writing.
Likewise, your rabid insistence that rap began as street culture and thus will only ever be street culture and thus should only ever be considered within the context of street culture (I'm imagining Chef Harvey poised over a giant black [and only black] cauldron of print and culture, sipping from a ladle, frowning and saying, "Hmm--needs more gangster"), makes you sound like a myopic fuckwit who is equating sociology with life, not unlike your boys in the ivory tower. I hope that???s not really the case.
If you're not in the mood for games, stop saying toy shit.
It became like this cult of personality thing where personal relationships between artists, not to mention clothes and other MTVCribs-esque allusions, became more important than the music itself.
Then again, a good deal of the music itself is about personal relationships between artists, clothes, and MTV Cribs-esque allusions these days.
I hope I'm not about to blow anyone's mind here, but modern journalism is very much about repurposing a press release.
You're missing my point.
The press release exists to let you know what's out there.
But once you get a hold of that thing, you're supposed to process it through your own skull.
What you write isn't supposed to read like the hype sheet.
No, I got your point entirely. My point is this: I got out of college with a journalism degree and a lot of friends who also had journalism degrees. We found our pretty quickly that the field pays like shit compared to most other professions, and requires a lot of initiative and personal legwork only to have your editor tear your work apart and constantly beat [insert your podunk newspaper/magazine here]'s "style" into you. After a while you have to decide whether you're going to bang your head against a wall in the name of integrity and individual expression in exchange for a piddling paycheck, or just say "F*ck it" and get with the program. And getting with the program often means rewriting portions of a press release because you have too many assignments and too little time, and they're not paying you well enough to truly give a F*ck anyway.
Or, you can do what most of us did and go into marketing or advertising.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
give me a gansgta writer who writes from a gangsta perspective, a woman writer who writes from a woman's perspective, a Mexcian writer who writes from a Mexican perspective, a gay writer who writes from a gay perspective
vs.
let them represent themselves as individuals
Well, which is it?
You already know what the I'm saying, smartypants. Not in the mood for games today.
It sounds like what you're saying is that you want writing that first and foremost represents a demographic--a
single demographic, at that. Apart from the logistic idiocy of this suggestion (what's a Mexican gangster supposed to do? flip a coin?), it makes it sound like you value neither individuals nor writing.
Likewise, your rabid insistence that rap began as street culture and thus will only ever be street culture and thus should only ever be considered within the context of street culture (I'm imagining Chef Harvey poised over a giant black [and only black] cauldron of print and culture, sipping from a ladle, frowning and saying, "Hmm--needs more gangster"), makes you sound like a myopic fuckwit who is equating sociology with life, not unlike your boys in the ivory tower. I hope that???s not really the case.
If you're not in the mood for games, stop saying toy shit.
Look dude, if you are a Mexican gangsta then write from a perspective a of a Mexican gangsta. The point is whoever you are are, write from that perspective instead of always trying to capture everyone's perspective at once.
Believe me, this is something I had to learn the hard way for myself as a rap-related journalist. When I first started out, I thought I had to assume a certain attitude, thus the Rashied byline. But eventually I learned that it would be best to just be myself and stick with that. And hey, it worked out really well for me in that I did much to build my local scene and basically much function came out of the words I wrote.
And no, think all the negative shit you want about the supposed foul of me still identifying hip-hop with street culture. I'm sticking with it. Why? Because it's still not only the folks on the street driving the trends, but its' the people on the streets who are hip-hop 24/7. They don't get to hide behind their ties in their office buildings when it's convenient for them to not be hip-hop that day. And again, none of the trends that start out elsewhere go anywhere without street approval first. Thankfully, it's all still attached to the streets and that's a fact. The problem is with people trying to constantly portray it as otherwise to the point of wholly inaccurate overkill.
I hope I'm not about to blow anyone's mind here, but modern journalism is very much about repurposing a press release.
You're missing my point.
The press release exists to let you know what's out there.
But once you get a hold of that thing, you're supposed to process it through your own skull.
What you write isn't supposed to read like the hype sheet.
No, I got your point entirely. My point is this: I got out of college with a journalism degree and a lot of friends who also had journalism degrees. We found our pretty quickly that the field pays like shit compared to most other professions, and requires a lot of initiative and personal legwork only to have your editor tear your work apart and constantly beat [insert your podunk newspaper/magazine here]'s "style" into you. After a while you have to decide whether you're going to bang your head against a wall in the name of integrity and individual expression in exchange for a piddling paycheck, or just say "F*ck it" and get with the program. And getting with the program often means rewriting portions of a press release because you have too many assignments and too little time, and they're not paying you well enough to truly give a F*ck anyway.
Or, you can do what most of us did and go into marketing or advertising.
Speaking as a person who also graduated with a journalism degree (and spent most of my post-college life working in that field), I understand you 100%.
Not to sound like an S.O.B., but for the most part I've been blessed to have editors who let me retain my "voice," knew where I was going with the text, and (on a good day) let me know ahead of time where and when the edits and corrections would fall. And this wasn't just fanzines, either, it was for major-market publications.
But for every one sensitive editor, there's one more who edits like someone who was born and raised in a butcher shop. It doesn't surprise me that the really distinct writers disappeared from Vibe the minute they became a "gossip magazine."
Blaze, for instance did the same shit, came right out of the box and tried to concretely define what hip-hop was for all.
Blaze was conceived purely as a vehicle for capturing ad revenue--I don't know why anybody would have had any greater expectations of it.
What lead you this this conclusion? I don't see how Blaze was any different from, say, XXL in this exact same regard.
Just what I've heard, and nothing about the magazine leads me to question it.
All magazines are obviously commercial endeavors, but there is a difference between having something resembling a mission and drumming up content purely to fill the space between the advertisements. XXL did generally have a vision, however muddled or reactionary. I'd say the same thing about Scratch as about Blaze--which was clearly conceived of to capitalize on money from software/equipment manufacturers and which was pathetically bad until its final few issues.
You may be right about Blaze, or better said, that wouldn't surprise me but having been on the contributing staff there from Issue #1, I actually thought they made a decent effort to try to push content and coverage in new directions. Part of the problem - in hindsight - is that Blaze probably favored too many gimmicks, especially in the front of the book and over time, there just wasn't enough in the mag to distinguish it from either The Source or XXL or Vibe to help it stay in the competition.
I always viewed Vibe as a little more glamourous than a "street" mag, in the early days.
Its written content aside, VIBE looked great back then and really stood out from the other "urban" mags of the period for that reason. They published a lot of iconic photos over the years.
You may be right about Blaze, or better said, that wouldn't surprise me but having been on the contributing staff there from Issue #1
That was not intended as a personal shot.
Ha, dude, I know. I'm not being defensive about any of this shit. Believe me, I don't have a lot of sentimentality for the the hip-hop publishing world at this point though that's probably a cynicism born more from just how depressing it is now vs. how I used to feel.
To me, the #1 killer of hip-hop publications PRIOR to the implosion of the print world was simply wholly out-of-whack expectations for ad revenue which then was compounded by overspending and general mismanagement at both the publishing and editorial level. These just were not very well run businesses and the more aspirational they got, the more likely they were to be done in.
The Source, of course, is one of the greatest clusterfucks in the history of American publishing thanks to Benzino and Mays' collusion. Vibe had some great years, business-wise, but were never prepared for a downturn. XXL's had similar issues and they are definitely a shell of their former self these days.
Love 'em or hate 'em, URB Magazine has stayed around longer than almost all of these publications and one reason why is that their aspirations were always moderate. Their circulation only does a fraction of what some place like Vibe or XXL would have done at their peak but guess who's still standing? The same could be said of Murder Dog. They aren't trying to be a million seller and have been content to do what they do and for that reason, they are still around,
The main problem with the "hip-hop publishing world" is the fact that the hype of the music doesn't transfer well into the time frame of publishing a physical product and the speed of which it needs to come out. When something is hot and then finally makes it to publishing where the track, artist, etc is peaking or already starting to decline. Many have already started to move on to the next hot track. Especially in the age of the Internet. I don't think it's because nobody wants to buy magazines any longer. It's that they won't buy one that doesn't seem relevant to them by the time it hits store shelves and their mailboxes.
How long does it take for a track/artist to blow up to the time it hits the presses and is distributed nationally or even internationally?
The core of hip hop music has always been a street/community type deal. Hence the reason why everything from mix tapes to street teams have always been effective. By the time a mag is bringing out the word, people have already moved on. Dj's are already playing the new promo/remix/cut.
That's why blogs IMO are 100 times more effective than doing a magazine. It's instant. It's what's going on right then and now. If you can capitalize on that (On the regular) you have a much better chance of staying relevant IMO.
Same with why it was important to have more shit to sell if you started to blow up. These artist that would blow up and then wonder why when their album dropped 3-6 months later didn't do well, was due to the fact that people had already moved on.
This can go for a lot of publications for that matter. I refuse to buy a tech mag now. Just because most of what is in there is old news by the time it gets into my hands.
The main problem with the "hip-hop publishing world" is the fact that the hype of the music doesn't transfer well into the time frame of publishing a physical product and the speed of which it needs to come out. When something is hot and then finally makes it to publishing where the track, artist, etc is peaking or already starting to decline. Many have already started to move on to the next hot track. Especially in the age of the Internet. I don't think it's because nobody wants to buy magazines any longer. It's that they won't buy one that doesn't seem relevant to them by the time it hits store shelves and their mailboxes.
How long does it take for a track/artist to blow up to the time it hits the presses and is distributed nationally or even internationally?
The core of hip hop music has always been a street/community type deal. Hence the reason why everything from mix tapes to street teams have always been effective. By the time a mag is bringing out the word, people have already moved on. Dj's are already playing the new promo/remix/cut.
That's why blogs IMO are 100 times more effective than doing a magazine. It's instant. It's what's going on right then and now. If you can capitalize on that (On the regular) you have a much better chance of staying relevant IMO.
Same with why it was important to have more shit to sell if you started to blow up. These artist that would blow up and then wonder why when their album dropped 3-6 months later didn't do well, was due to the fact that people had already moved on.
That says more (negatively) about the audience than the music or the magazines.
If your fan base is that fickle, then no wonder the industry is fading.
If your goal is to be an artist and make music, then no worries. But if your there to make hype and move units. C'est la vie.
If you want a magazine to keep being relevant, you need to compete with what's moving and shaking on the streets in the now. You could get away with it 10 years ago. Nowadays, not so much.
Wasnt The Source accused of selling out when they put TLC on the cover? Vibe didnt have that pressure.
Partly because people knew where Vibe[/b] was coming from, it wasn't as if Vibe[/b] was started by Shock G with funding from Tommy Boy (who to their credit had WEA distribution).
The TLC issue did turn some heads because it wasn't so much that people loved or hated them, but... someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but it was as if it was an intrusion. Did TLC really need The Source[/b] up to that point? That lead to the Mary J. Blige cover shot in late 1994, and then it just went into what it became, for better or worse.
If your goal is to be an artist and make music, then no worries. But if your there to make hype and move units. C'est la vie.
If you want a magazine to keep being relevant, you need to compete with what's moving and shaking on the streets in the now.
even so, that kind of "now and only now" thinking is what id expect from a twelve-year-old Hannah Montana fan, not a supposed adult. if you REALLY have grassroots support, that fan base sticks with you. if the "hype" moves on after five minutes, that doesn't make you any better than O-Town or 98 Degrees.
you say that you dont trust magazines about tech equipment because the info is already dated by the time it gets to you. with most monthly magazines, the mag is usually published a month after it was written, more or less. so does it take 30 days for the next new thing to come out?
maybe that's just me castigating the R&B/hip-hop market. but if the hype is right, you stick with it, and you dont need maximum radio play to tell you if its good or not.
It's not that I don't "trust" the magazine. It's that I can't see myself or anyone else for that matter buying one where a huge portion of it is filled with ads and another portion is content that was relative 1-3 months ago. Just to buy it for 10% of content that "could" be worthy eg: Well written article.
Give you another example. Try nowadays to pick up a magazine with a top ten list for hip hop music. Even 10 years ago the list could seem somewhat stale once the mag was in your hands. But now a dayz?
One dude with a big following on twitter could cause a bigger impact than any mag on a track.
Don't get me wrong. There have been some great mags. I use to love UK's Blue & Soul when I was a kid. Wish it was still around.
Waxpo is a great mag. Which doesn't have to worry about the problem I'm talking about, since they are geared towards producing great content that isn't time sensitive. Tho, their main issue I would think is new subscription growth. Since their subscription base I'm guessing doesn't increase greatly being supported by collectors. Which I'm sure doesn't help increasing ad revenues.
(. . . ) Love 'em or hate 'em, URB Magazine has stayed around longer than almost all of these publications and one reason why is that their aspirations were always moderate. Their circulation only does a fraction of what some place like Vibe or XXL would have done at their peak but guess who's still standing? The same could be said of Murder Dog. They aren't trying to be a million seller and have been content to do what they do and for that reason, they are still around,
1. I was thinking about Murderdog as the last magazine that is enthusiastic about rap. Small circulation + rabid fans also succeeds as a business model for a few musicians. Seems like community first, then barnes and noble distribution is key.
2. Two of the 4 newsweekly's in my area have folded in the last 12 months. So many staff writers have been dumped in the area that freelancers have packed it up -- one key paper didn't buy freelance stories for six months. Lotta papers packing it in these days.
DOR: You make some good points about changing expectations amongst the consumer base but a lot of the problems impacting hip-hop magazines preceded the transformations in media consumption.
I also think it's overstated that people want the hot hot hot shit right right now. That exists certainly but it's only one slice of the consumer pie. I really think mismanagement and oversized expectations did in more than a few publications. Small-to-mid-market magazines have an easier time but if you swing for the fences, be prepared to strike out.
The problem is that no one wants to invest in a mid-sized publication these days (perhaps for good reason, in these economic times) but I think it'd be much easier for an >100,000 circulation mag to thrive.
Comments
You're missing my point.
The press release exists to let you know what's out there.
But once you get a hold of that thing, you're supposed to process it through your own skull.
What you write isn't supposed to read like the hype sheet.
But the point is, 1990's Vibe was good IN SPITE OF Time Warner. Not BECAUSE OF it.
I don't know how many of you actually saw the mag back in 1992-96, but the mag actually had some substance then.
Now...if Vibe had started out the way it wound up, THEN I'd be all like: "well, what do you expect? It's no better and no worse than everything else."
But early Vibe was intelligent without being bourgie. At some point the master plan got fucked up, and the next thing you know, the mag became an illiterate gossip rag.
I hate to say it, but there has always been a serious lack of intelligent soul magazines in the US. Most of the ones I remember from back in the time were on the fan-mag tip. At one point Vibe went a long way towards correcting that, but those days ended long ago.
But the same shit basically happened at every other magazine. Blaze, for instance did the same shit, came right out of the box and tried to concretely define what hip-hop was for all. It was no longer, this is me, this is what I know, and you can make of it what you wish. It became, we all got together and decided on every word in every piece together...and as Oliver cosigned, it made shit just too monolithic in of course a skewed way.
I'll take a poorly written article on a regionally hot artist in Murderdog over a well written piece on an already overexposed national act in Vibe or the Source or XXL or Fader or Blaze (and the same damn article was likely to be in each at the same time) any day of the week.
Likewise, your rabid insistence that rap began as street culture and thus will only ever be street culture and thus should only ever be considered within the context of street culture (I'm imagining Chef Harvey poised over a giant black [and only black] cauldron of print and culture, sipping from a ladle, frowning and saying, "Hmm--needs more gangster"), makes you sound like a myopic fuckwit who is equating sociology with life, not unlike your boys in the ivory tower. I hope that???s not really the case.
If you're not in the mood for games, stop saying toy shit.
Blaze was conceived purely as a vehicle for capturing ad revenue--I don't know why anybody would have had any greater expectations of it.
Then again, a good deal of the music itself is about personal relationships between artists, clothes, and MTV Cribs-esque allusions these days.
No, I got your point entirely. My point is this: I got out of college with a journalism degree and a lot of friends who also had journalism degrees. We found our pretty quickly that the field pays like shit compared to most other professions, and requires a lot of initiative and personal legwork only to have your editor tear your work apart and constantly beat [insert your podunk newspaper/magazine here]'s "style" into you. After a while you have to decide whether you're going to bang your head against a wall in the name of integrity and individual expression in exchange for a piddling paycheck, or just say "F*ck it" and get with the program. And getting with the program often means rewriting portions of a press release because you have too many assignments and too little time, and they're not paying you well enough to truly give a F*ck anyway.
Or, you can do what most of us did and go into marketing or advertising.
Look dude, if you are a Mexican gangsta then write from a perspective a of a Mexican gangsta. The point is whoever you are are, write from that perspective instead of always trying to capture everyone's perspective at once.
Believe me, this is something I had to learn the hard way for myself as a rap-related journalist. When I first started out, I thought I had to assume a certain attitude, thus the Rashied byline. But eventually I learned that it would be best to just be myself and stick with that. And hey, it worked out really well for me in that I did much to build my local scene and basically much function came out of the words I wrote.
And no, think all the negative shit you want about the supposed foul of me still identifying hip-hop with street culture. I'm sticking with it. Why? Because it's still not only the folks on the street driving the trends, but its' the people on the streets who are hip-hop 24/7. They don't get to hide behind their ties in their office buildings when it's convenient for them to not be hip-hop that day. And again, none of the trends that start out elsewhere go anywhere without street approval first. Thankfully, it's all still attached to the streets and that's a fact. The problem is with people trying to constantly portray it as otherwise to the point of wholly inaccurate overkill.
What lead you this this conclusion? I don't see how Blaze was any different from, say, XXL in this exact same regard.
I stopped using Rashied as yes a nom de plume (Urb, 4080, Austin Chronicle, etc.) several years before Soulstrut came into being.
Speaking as a person who also graduated with a journalism degree (and spent most of my post-college life working in that field), I understand you 100%.
Not to sound like an S.O.B., but for the most part I've been blessed to have editors who let me retain my "voice," knew where I was going with the text, and (on a good day) let me know ahead of time where and when the edits and corrections would fall. And this wasn't just fanzines, either, it was for major-market publications.
But for every one sensitive editor, there's one more who edits like someone who was born and raised in a butcher shop. It doesn't surprise me that the really distinct writers disappeared from Vibe the minute they became a "gossip magazine."
Just what I've heard, and nothing about the magazine leads me to question it.
All magazines are obviously commercial endeavors, but there is a difference between having something resembling a mission and drumming up content purely to fill the space between the advertisements. XXL did generally have a vision, however muddled or reactionary. I'd say the same thing about Scratch as about Blaze--which was clearly conceived of to capitalize on money from software/equipment manufacturers and which was pathetically bad until its final few issues.
That was not intended as a personal shot.
Its written content aside, VIBE looked great back then and really stood out from the other "urban" mags of the period for that reason. They published a lot of iconic photos over the years.
Ha, dude, I know. I'm not being defensive about any of this shit. Believe me, I don't have a lot of sentimentality for the the hip-hop publishing world at this point though that's probably a cynicism born more from just how depressing it is now vs. how I used to feel.
The Source, of course, is one of the greatest clusterfucks in the history of American publishing thanks to Benzino and Mays' collusion. Vibe had some great years, business-wise, but were never prepared for a downturn. XXL's had similar issues and they are definitely a shell of their former self these days.
Love 'em or hate 'em, URB Magazine has stayed around longer than almost all of these publications and one reason why is that their aspirations were always moderate. Their circulation only does a fraction of what some place like Vibe or XXL would have done at their peak but guess who's still standing? The same could be said of Murder Dog. They aren't trying to be a million seller and have been content to do what they do and for that reason, they are still around,
The main problem with the "hip-hop publishing world" is the fact that the hype of the music doesn't transfer well into the time frame of publishing a physical product and the speed of which it needs to come out. When something is hot and then finally makes it to publishing where the track, artist, etc is peaking or already starting to decline. Many have already started to move on to the next hot track. Especially in the age of the Internet. I don't think it's because nobody wants to buy magazines any longer. It's that they won't buy one that doesn't seem relevant to them by the time it hits store shelves and their mailboxes.
How long does it take for a track/artist to blow up to the time it hits the presses and is distributed nationally or even internationally?
The core of hip hop music has always been a street/community type deal. Hence the reason why everything from mix tapes to street teams have always been effective. By the time a mag is bringing out the word, people have already moved on. Dj's are already playing the new promo/remix/cut.
That's why blogs IMO are 100 times more effective than doing a magazine. It's instant. It's what's going on right then and now. If you can capitalize on that (On the regular) you have a much better chance of staying relevant IMO.
Same with why it was important to have more shit to sell if you started to blow up. These artist that would blow up and then wonder why when their album dropped 3-6 months later didn't do well, was due to the fact that people had already moved on.
This can go for a lot of publications for that matter. I refuse to buy a tech mag now. Just because most of what is in there is old news by the time it gets into my hands.
That says more (negatively) about the audience than the music or the magazines.
If your fan base is that fickle, then no wonder the industry is fading.
You live by the sword, you die by the...
If your goal is to be an artist and make music, then no worries. But if your there to make hype and move units. C'est la vie.
If you want a magazine to keep being relevant, you need to compete with what's moving and shaking on the streets in the now. You could get away with it 10 years ago. Nowadays, not so much.
Partly because people knew where Vibe[/b] was coming from, it wasn't as if Vibe[/b] was started by Shock G with funding from Tommy Boy (who to their credit had WEA distribution).
The TLC issue did turn some heads because it wasn't so much that people loved or hated them, but... someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but it was as if it was an intrusion. Did TLC really need The Source[/b] up to that point? That lead to the Mary J. Blige cover shot in late 1994, and then it just went into what it became, for better or worse.
even so, that kind of "now and only now" thinking is what id expect from a twelve-year-old Hannah Montana fan, not a supposed adult. if you REALLY have grassroots support, that fan base sticks with you. if the "hype" moves on after five minutes, that doesn't make you any better than O-Town or 98 Degrees.
you say that you dont trust magazines about tech equipment because the info is already dated by the time it gets to you. with most monthly magazines, the mag is usually published a month after it was written, more or less. so does it take 30 days for the next new thing to come out?
maybe that's just me castigating the R&B/hip-hop market. but if the hype is right, you stick with it, and you dont need maximum radio play to tell you if its good or not.
peace, stein. . .
Give you another example. Try nowadays to pick up a magazine with a top ten list for hip hop music. Even 10 years ago the list could seem somewhat stale once the mag was in your hands. But now a dayz?
One dude with a big following on twitter could cause a bigger impact than any mag on a track.
Don't get me wrong. There have been some great mags. I use to love UK's Blue & Soul when I was a kid. Wish it was still around.
Waxpo is a great mag. Which doesn't have to worry about the problem I'm talking about, since they are geared towards producing great content that isn't time sensitive. Tho, their main issue I would think is new subscription growth. Since their subscription base I'm guessing doesn't increase greatly being supported by collectors. Which I'm sure doesn't help increasing ad revenues.
1. I was thinking about Murderdog as the last magazine that is enthusiastic about rap. Small circulation + rabid fans also succeeds as a business model for a few musicians. Seems like community first, then barnes and noble distribution is key.
2. Two of the 4 newsweekly's in my area have folded in the last 12 months. So many staff writers have been dumped in the area that freelancers have packed it up -- one key paper didn't buy freelance stories for six months. Lotta papers packing it in these days.
3. What happened to Elemental?
I also think it's overstated that people want the hot hot hot shit right right now. That exists certainly but it's only one slice of the consumer pie. I really think mismanagement and oversized expectations did in more than a few publications. Small-to-mid-market magazines have an easier time but if you swing for the fences, be prepared to strike out.
The problem is that no one wants to invest in a mid-sized publication these days (perhaps for good reason, in these economic times) but I think it'd be much easier for an >100,000 circulation mag to thrive.