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Spinning in the GraveThe three biggest reasons music magazines are dying.

By Jonah WeinerUpdated Tuesday, July 28, 2009, at 6:47 AM ET

Illustration by Charlie Powell. To the varied signs of the economic collapse we can now add a small but notable subspecies of urbanite: You'll recognize him (or her) by the ear buds burrowing into his head, the freebie SXSW tote bag slung over his shoulder, and the unintelligible mutterings about "melisma" and "twee-core" crossing his lips. If you see such a person out and about—likely wandering a neighborhood rich with coffee shops or, even better, two-for-one happy hours—remain calm but keep your distance. This is a music journalist, a type never famous for social skills, and he's in an especially bad mood these days.

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Late last month, Vibe magazine announced that it was ceasing publication. The next day, word arrived that Spin was laying off a half-dozen staffers. In late March, Blender folded outright, and a few months before that, Rolling Stone trimmed its masthead. (Blender hired me out of college in 2002, and I worked there until its demise.) For this strange moment, at least, many onetime professional music nerds share a common experience with many onetime investment bankers: whiplash.

Some of the problems that have beset music magazines are familiar from discussions about the publishing industry's woes in general: Readership's down, advertising's down, the old guard has been slow in adapting to the Internet. But like newspapers and shelter titles, music magazines have proven especially vulnerable.

I'm going to leave aside the question of whether Blender and Vibe somehow deserved their undoing, via editorial missteps or poor business-side decisions, and whether Rolling Stone and Spin deserve their present difficulties. Criticisms attach to every title, and while such factors play a part in the music-mag death march, they're negligible when considered alongside three bigger problems that cut deep and wide across the medium:

1. There are fewer superstars, and the same musicians show up on every magazine cover.

Say Beyoncé—or Kanye, or Kelly Clarkson, or any of the few musical acts that still command massive appeal—announces a new album. Rolling Stone may try to book her for a cover, but even if it gets a guarantee she won't appear on the cover of another music magazine, readers will have plenty of time to tire of her face as it beams from the covers of "urban" magazines, women's magazines, teen magazines, fashion magazines, and tabloids (to say nothing of gossip blogs, Access Hollywood, etc.). No matter how striking your cover is, it will pop from the racks that much less thanks to the inevitable media saturation of its star. My former editor at Blender, Craig Marks, identified this phenomenon as "cover fatigue": In trying to book covers with maximum reach, music magazines dunk month after month into the same shrinking pool of monolithic stars.

Different strategies for dealing with this have emerged, but nothing surefire. Not long ago, a Spin editor told me they'd realized that a cover featuring a multiplatinum rocker sold only slightly better than one featuring a critic's darling like Vampire Weekend. Spin decided they might as well choose more acts they loved as cover stars rather than focusing on bands that sold millions. This niche-targeting logic drives the indie-music Web site Pitchfork, whose core audience is perfectly happy to read a 650-word review of, say, the new Black Moth Super Rainbow album. But it's unclear whether the same thinking can sustain a magazine with a circulation of half a million copies a month—and it bears emphasizing that Pitchfork doesn't need to draw readers in with a single image.

2. Music mags have less to offer music lovers, and music lovers need them less than ever anyway.

Time was, record companies sent advance copies of albums to music journalists. They, in turn, offered a distinct service to fans with timely, expert evaluations of new music. In the early aughts, labels, frightened by online leaks, tightened their grip on advance music, and listening sessions became the norm for most popular acts. Often held without the complete CD, these sessions encourage partially informed, snap judgments. They're less than ideal in other ways, too: A colleague once reviewed a G-Unit album while 50 Cent sat directly across from him, nodding vigorously to the beat. Along the way, labels have tried other experiments. I've seen album advances come as preloaded iPods (the Pussycat Dolls), vinyl (the White Stripes), cassettes (Justin Timberlake), and a Discman glued shut (Tori Amos). As advances of high-profile records slowed to a trickle, Blender and other magazines working with long lead times were forced to run many big reviews several months late or skip them altogether.

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Jonah Weiner is a pop critic for Slate.

Illustration by Charlie Powell.

COMMENTS

It stopped being about music! While I, as much as anyone, can appreciate the magazine and newspaper as methods of increasing social awareness and showing readers the picture at large, magazines such as Rolling Stone dropped off my radar completely once it began belligerently hitting readers over the head with its brand of politicking. Instead of being reasonable about its opinions, Rolling Stone transformed itself from a music magazine that also brought up social issues to being a social issue magazine that occasionally talked about music. It's akin to MTV when it stopped playing videos and started using its airtime as a soap box for reality TV and trendy social issues. It wasn't even about responsibility to reach the public - it was about being trendy, and it was transparently so.

And exactly has Spin contributed? It had neither the historical legacy of Rolling Stone, the hipness (and penchant for displaying underground talent) as Blender and it lacked the niche of Vibe. If Rolling Stone is MTV, the head honcho, Blender is MTV2, where indie and less mainstream talent went to be discovered, and Spin was MTV3, where music just went to die.

-- dcdesign
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The biggest problem that music magazines have is that they cannot bite the hand that feeds them. These magazines cover the music industry, and depend on the music industry giving them access. If Rolling Stone comes out and says that the new Britney Spears album is terrible, not only will their journalists not be able to get an interviews with her in the future, but her label may well decide to blacklist the magazine for their entire stable of musicians. So music magazines implicitly fawn over whatever is "hot" without being able to step back and judge whether a given artist or band is truly putting out good product.

Peel back the layer again, and you see that music magazines no longer lead the masses, they follow them. Since music listeners can find new music quickly and easily on their own, the music magazines are no longer a gateway. So the labels and artists no longer need to be on the cover of Rolling Stone to sell albums or songs on iTunes, and people are making up their own minds about an album before it's even reviewed. So now the music magazines find themselves essentially ratifying what public opinion has already decided about an artist by covering the ones that are "hot" and ignoring the ones that are not.

The Onion's AV Club gets about as honest as a mainstream media organization can get about these kinds of things. They are big, but not so big that they depend on what the music industry gives them. And of course, be your own judge. Technology has allowed us to be the critic.

-- Sycamancy
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