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I
was sad to hear of the clo- sure of the Word maga- zine, putting out its final issue about now, not simply because it was the most intelli- gent and readable of main- stream music magazines, or that editor Mark Ellen is one of the music business’s good guys, who has been enormously sup- portive to us at fRoots. No, it’s because the news gives more misleading ammunition to the
wishful thinking hawks of the shiny shiny technotendency and the professional prophets of doom.
In spite of them, there’s still little evidence that a sub- stantial number of people want to read in-depth magazine features electronically. Shorter newspaper bites, maybe, but not several-thousand-word features. Figures unearthed by UK Press Gazette recently trashed any notion that subscrip- tions to digital editions have taken off in a big way. We were staggered to find that we’d sold more than UK Vogue, and that’s still only measured in hundreds. Anything else you read is inflated bullshit for advertisers, who already know that returns on paid on-line advertising are immea- surably low. That’s why we don’t even bother to offer it.
Our columnist Tim Chipping, discussing this on Face- book, said “I think bound paper is still the best way to pre- sent magazine articles… we might just realise that we already have the optimum medium for the media.”
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The problem after a music magazine closure is in working out which bit of evidence to believe, as the sector has found itself in a perfect storm: battling the massive changes in the major record industry, all the stuff I detailed last month that’s hitting live music this year (recession, Jubilympics, weather, Tories etc), the scandalous monopoly practices of the news trade, changing leisure priorities and simply too much stuff.
The Word was unfortunate to launch just before the mainstream music industry fell over, so for a magazine that had to depend on major label advertising it was bad enough, but then add government austerity measures cut- ting into your other source, ‘lifestyle’ ads, and the odds will have become insurmountable.
Imagine if we’d only concentrated on world music, which by its nature needs actual record labels with touring artists to get releases out there, unlike the folk scene which has always thrived on small scale independence. This issue may be jam- packed, but it has the smallest number of world music CDs reviewed and artist tours listed since the mid-1980s.
Media reports have also seized on the demise of Word publisher David Hepworth’s famous “Fifty quid bloke” as their core readership – the person who’d blow that much on a couple of CDs, a DVD and a book on his way home from work on a Friday. Well, our most recent readership survey showed that fRoots readers are still gobbling up their average two CDs a week (even if a percentage of it is now in paid-for downloads). Maybe it’s mainstream music that’s dropped a lot of appeal then. Oh, but didn’t we know that already: isn’t that why you’re reading fRoots?
Ian Anderson
Photo: Judith Burrows
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