This year has been a rough one for music magazines: their ranks are thinning, the business they’re covering is becoming more notable for being one that’s putting out a product people don’t want to pay for than anything else, and now Crain’s New York Business puts into numbers what anyone who picked up a music magazine probably noticed already: Ad pages at the big four magazines are down substantially from last year’s tallies, even as the magazines are increasing their rate bases. (Only Spin has weathered the downturn, with its ad pages actually up 22% since 2007.) Why? MORE »
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Four Reasons Music Magazines Are Doing Almost As Well As The Music Business
Greyhound’s Attempt To Get “Edgy” Backfires Worse Than One Of Its Rickety Old Buses
Yesterday a member of the band WZT Hearts discovered that his group was featured in an XLR8R ad for Greyhound–the ad was in the form of four tear-out postcards (reprinted above) that had shots from concerts by WZT Hearts, Dan Deacon, Ruins, and Team Robespierre on the front, and little blurbs about the bands, as well as the bus company’s logo, on the back. Needless to say, the artists were not pleased to find out that their likenesses were being used in this ad campaign unbeknownst to them (especially since implied endorsements like this seem to be more and more common these days), and Deacon unleashed this anti-Greyhound salvo via MySpace’s handy bulletin feature: MORE »
RJ Reynolds Sued For Enticing Indie Rockers (And America’s Children) To Smoke
So it turns out that indie rock bads, fans, and anti-smoking activists weren’t the only ones upset when RJ Reynolds and Rolling Stone published a pull-out advertising supplement last month called “The Indie Rock Universe” that included the names of just about every working band you could comfortably tag “indie rock” in iTunes. “Six U.S. states sued the maker of Camel cigarettes on Tuesday,” Reuters reports, with more apparently to follow. MORE »
“Indie Rock Universe” Pull-Out Lights A Fire Under Anti-Tobacco Activist’s Butt
Camel and Rolling Stone are coming under fire for the “Indie Rock Universe” pull-out in the latest 40th-anniversary issue, thanks to the pull-out’s tight integration of advertising content and editorial. Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids president Matthew L. Myers called the graffiti-inspired spread “one great big cigarette ad,” and he’s alleging that the doodly nature of the insert violates a 1998 agreement between tobacco companies and state attorneys general that prohibits the use of cartoons in cigarette ads. Could this be the final nail in the coffin of musicians being used to hawk smokable wares, which reached its peak for me when I went to a Marlboro-sponsored Violent Femmes show that had catering in the late ’90s? I asked the smoker half of the Idolator team for his take on the relationship between Big Tobacco and Little Music in the IM interview after the jump. MORE »
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“Rolling Stone” Is Still Ready For Its Close-Up
Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe and Spin are given a once-over by an anonymous writer who’s contributed to several of those titles–or maybe even all of them! After the click-through, a look at the new issue of Rolling Stone: MORE »
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Project X Is Just About To Lose Its Mind
As part of Idolator’s continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Jackin’ Pop editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, he counts down the best and worst charts of the 1960s: MORE »
