Kerrang find a new home

Mixmag media, who own, erm, Mixmag, have bought Kerrang! from Bauer and have big plans for the UK's last rock weekly (No, the NME no longer counts). The plan involves it ceasing to be a rock weekly.

Campaing Live reports:

Jerry Perkins, who runs Mixmag Media, plans to turn Kerrang! from a print weekly to a monthly in the UK and focus on building its global, digital audience.

"Mixmag and Kerrang! are quite similar – they’re ‘f*** it’ audiences," Perkins said. "They like what they like and don’t care about what anyone else thinks."

I think this is a polite way of saying "they're clinging to their unfashionable music tastes, and prepared to pay".

Bauer keeps the Kerrang brand for TV and radio - which isn't going to be easy; the K! radio playlist has drifted quite a way from the K! paper worldview even under the same roof. (Kerrang Radio is less 'fuck it' and more 'gosh, if we must'.)

As part of the deal, Mixmag have also bought the Face brand, with plans to revive it online, and maybe in print. At the time it closed in 2004, The Face had managed to slot itself into self-mythologised irrelevance, so it'll be interesting to see how that works online.

Hammer won't fall: Team Rock saved

Before Christmas, it looked like Metal Hammer and stablemates Classic Rock and Prog had published their last.

Good news for the new year, though, because Future Publishing, the previous owners of the titles, has stepped in to acquire Team Rock, the magazines and the websites:

“The acquisition of these classic rock brands with their associated magazines, events and websites marks a further step in our buy and build strategy,” said Zillah Byng-Thorne, chief executive of Future.

“It further reinforces our creation of a leading global specialist media platform with data at its heart, which we are monetising through diversified revenue streams. We look forward to developing further these iconic and much-loved brands and to continuing to serve their communities of dedicated enthusiasts around the world.”

Future has scooped the lot - including a radio licence - for just £800,000. Back in 2013, Future had sold just the magazines for £10.2million.

So, not perhaps a totally happy ending, as the business clearly isn't in a great shape - but there's hope, and in 2017, we need all the hope we can get.

Folding magazines: Classic Rock & Metal Hammer

This would be grim news at any time, but just before Christmas amplifies the grimness: Team Rock have Team Rock, who publish Classic Rock and Metal Hammer magazines, have called in the administrators:

Thomas Campbell MacLennan, Alexander Iain Fraser and Jason Daniel Baker of FRP Advisory LLP were appointed as Joint Administrators of Team Rock Limited (“the Company”) on 19 December 2016.

The affairs, business and property of the Company are being managed by the Joint Administrators, who act as agents of the Company and without personal liability.

The Company is being managed on a care and maintenance basis only whilst a buyer for the assets is sought. Accordingly, the TeamRock website will be unavailable for the foreseeable future.

The administrators are assessing the position regarding publication of magazines. If you are a subscriber to the Company’s publications the administrators can be contacted via email at teamrock.subscribers@frpadvisory.com.

27 people in Scotland and 46 in London have lost their jobs. According to the BBC report, Team Rock had been losing money for quite a while; they're hopeful the brands will find a buyer - and so hopefully some of those staff will be rehired.

Unfolding magazines: Paste is coming back

It's six years since Paste abandoned its print edition and became web-only.

Next year, though, crowdfunding permitting, it's coming back as a physical product:

With its large 12"-by-12"-inch format, thick paper and rich colors, it'll be unlike any magazine you've seen. We're sparing no expense from production quality to all the best writers, photographers and illustrators. We're bringing back the Paste Sampler, but this time it's a 150-gram colored vinyl album with exclusive tracks recorded at the Paste Studio in New York. We'll be working with our original designer, Jose Reyes, and his award-winning design team Metaleap Creative. And we're eschewing traditional distribution to deliver it directly to you.

(To be fair, a 12x12 magazine with a vinyl record isn't quite like 'any magazine you've seen', as there was that one in the 80s which was exactly like that - was it Debut?)

Folding magazines: Three titles shutter

None music magazines, although all had connections (greater or lesser) with music - Details, FHM and Zoo have all run out of time today.

Bauer is officially only suspending FHM and Zoo, although it's pretty clear that they're not coming back in any meaningful form. FHM long ago lost its ability to write about music in an interesting way; Zoo never had it.

Meanwhile, in the US, Conde Nast has decided that maintaining Details and GQ is one aftershave-and-cufflink title too many, so it won't sweat the Details any longer. Around the turn of the century, Details would do a regular music issue, and ran a series of sampler CDs, but recently it's been focusing more firmly on the 'men who have an ironing board' market.

Folding magazines: Bop

Bop - which has provided American youngsters with permatanned-and-white-toothed pin ups since 1983 - has been closed by its publisher:

Sister title Tiger Beat remains, but probably on borrowed time.

You might like: Uncool

A new music magazine? In 2013? That pays its contributors? Can it really be?

Yes, it can: introducing Uncool:

Here’s what you’ll find inside:

Punk Rock Princesses: A Case For Something Corporate by Devon Maloney
Dangerously In Love: My Decade With Beyonce by Jamieson Cox
Repeat Offenders: Pressing Play, Over And Over Again by Harley Brown
Guiltless Pleasures: Imagining A Post-Snob World by David Greenwald, Simon Vozick-Levinson and Lindsay Zoladz
Miss You Like Crazy: Canada’s Lost Boy Bands by Melody Lau
He Ain’t Even Know It: On Rick Ross, Rap And Responsibility by Henry Adaso
I Don’t Want To Come Back Down From This (Sound)Cloud by Taleen Kalenderian
Why Bother? Talking To Myself About Weezer by Jillian Mapes

It's Three-NinetyNine American, which at current exchange rates is about two fifty in GBP or 198 in Kyrgyzstani Som; pdf only.

Writers being paid. Worth supporting.

Rock mags find new home

Classic Rock and Metal Hammer have changed hands, with the spectacularly named Team Rock purchasing the titles from Future.

Team Rock is led by John Myers:

Myers is executive chairman of the new company, TeamRock, which will create and distribute content to what it describes as the "large but under-served community" of rock music fans.

The new business is expected to announce more acquisitions in the next few days.

Under-served community? With the two titles here, plus a bunch of spin-off sister publications, and Bauer's Kerrang empire, and the Download Festival, and Absolute Classic Rock, I'm not sure I'd identify this as a market segment that is especially neglected, but good luck to anyone trying to build a magazine brand. You... you are interested in the print product, right?

TeamRock describes itself as a "new international multimedia content creation and distribution business" to "provide and create premium content to rock-music fans across the world via digital platforms and through the Classic Rock and Metal Hammer titles".

Oh.

Done Waiting abandons screen for paper

The decade-old music blog Done Waiting has closed down, or rather leaped media. It's going to be reopening soon as an annual print title.

Ha! A print title? How will they be able to keep up-to-the-second as a print magazine?

Reader's voice: Hang on a second, Done Waiting announced it was closing online at the end of February. It's taken you nearly a month to mention it here. Doesn't that rather spit in the eye of your claim that you get much more timely content online?

Shh... be quiet, now. Shhh.

Artrocker: Don't look at it as the loss of a print edition

I'm sure it's not putting on a brave face, as Artrocker closes its print edition:

As of 28th February 2013 Artrocker Magazine will be going 100% digital! We can’t express in words how excited we are about taking the magazine 100% digital and the opportunities it brings for an independent music magazine publisher like us; but we’re jubilant, to say the least.

Hey, don't weep for us, readers. This is exciting, yes?

Since the worldwide, and much-heralded, launch of the magazine on the iPad and the release of our Official Special Edition Gary Numan App, we’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response and the opportunities for forward-thinking, innovative applications of digital when making a new music magazine.

It's like seeing someone being thrown out of their flat talking about how exciting sleeping in a tent is.

“Artrocker has always been an innovator,” says Artrocker Co-Founder and Editor-In-Chief Tom Fawcett, “When people were still ‘clubbing’ in the noughties we started a rock’n’roll night and put on the first London shows by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, The Black Keys, Interpol, Maximo Park and so many more great bands that went on to reshape music and culture on a global level. When people were saying the music industry was dead we launched a record label and suddenly the tide turned and vinyl sales rose for the first time in over a decade. People were saying ‘Magazines are over’ so we started a magazine, and here we are, almost 10 years later, still going strong and again utilising the technology and tools available to us.”

"It's brilliant, you don't have to pay council tax when you're sleeping in a tent. When I moved into this flat three years back, everyone said 'paying a mortgage is tricky, you know', but look at me now, still in the neighbourhood, discovering new corners of the park where the police don't check at night."

It's okay to mourn the loss of what was a beautifully-produced physical asset, guys; you can even do that without having to imply that a digital version is a fall-back position. I really hope in ten years' time we'll all still be around to celebrate the tablet version of Artrocker being replaced with an edition that uses the new 'being lasered directly into your brain' technology.

The last Word

Some grim news this morning for people who like being entertained by the written word done well: The Word is closing:

We regret to announce that the August issue of The Word, which will be published in the second week of July, will be the last.

In the nine years since the magazine launched there have been dramatic changes in the media and the music business. These changes have made it more difficult for a small independent magazine to survive and provide its staff with a living. This hasn't been made any easier by the economic climate of the wider world.

I've been lucky enough to have some things published in The Word, and some of you (lots of you) read this blog when posts turn up on their website through the magic of RSS, but it's as a reader that I'll miss the magazine.

I still remember devouring the first edition on a journey from Liverpool to Barrow - this turns out to be nine years ago - and looking forward, monthly, to each next instalment.

Many magazines vanish without leaving a ripple. Some close, and it's a pity. The Word going is a crying shame.

Thanks, everyone. You'll be missed.

Do we love We Love Pop?

Here's something that feels counter-intuitive: the launch of a pop magazine. An actual pop magazine.

It's called We Love Pop. Or, rather We [heart symbol] Pop.

There's some odd things about it, though. The editor is Malcolm Mackenzie, who previously was in charge at thenowdefunct thelondonpaper, Murdoch's short-lived London freesheet. It seems a bit of a strange shift from pushing bite-sized fact-gobbets into commuter hands to creating a pop magazine for teenagers, don't you think?

The title is described by Media Week as being:

The first issue of the magazine is out on Wednesday (20 July) with a cover price of £1 and its launch will be supported by a marketing campaign, including point of sale, outdoor media and digital.

The magazine will target a core audience of 13-15 year olds with in-depth interviews with pop stars, behind-the-scenes exclusives, photos and a "high-end cover gift" designed to appeal to a savvy teen audience.

What MediaWeek neglects to mention is that, unlike Smash Hits or Number One, this is clearly pointed at girls. And just because you might say 'surely liking pop isn't gender specific', the magazine cover is slathered in pink and has "boys" as one of the coverlines. It couldn't be more offputting for teenage blokes if it had a photo of a dick caught in a zipper on the front page.

Given that teen magazines have mostly been closing rather than opening, the very idea seems a bit audacious. Who would put money into such a title?

TeenToday lets the cat out of the bag:

Fresh off the back of the runaway success of X Magazine (couldn’t find it anywhere, lasted about 4 editions, editor jumped ship) we’ve heard that Universal Records in partnership with Egmont Publishing are about to launch a brand new pop mag called (wait for it…) We Love Pop.

So despite all the claims of the market wanting the title, the real people who want a pop magazine is... a record label. I suspect this won't last much beyond finding out that the forces that crushed the successful Smash Hits brand are less kind still to a fledgling.

CORRECTION: I misread the MediaWeek article yesterday; Malcolm Mackenzie was music editor of thelondonpaper and not the actual editor. Which makes a bit more sense. Thanks to the commenter who pointed that out, and apologies for the error.

Disappear Here: Where did they go?

The sight of ill-prepared people with a sense of entitlement slapping together godawful magazines on this week' Apprentice made me wonder: whatever did happen to Disappear Here, Peaches Geldof's vanity mag project?

Back in 2008, when it launched, there were bold plans:

"Vice magazine started as a free giveaway and now it's an international brand," Geldof explains. "It's got tours, bars and TV shows. That would be easy for us to emulate. James [Brown] knows Vince Power and consults for AMC concerts, who organise the V festivals, and we're both always being asked to give our names and contacts to various ventures. Now we'll be able to do it for ourselves."

Brown, who probably should have known better, was keen to keep it all youthful - he wanted it written by schoolkids:

"I think it would be great if our inbox filled up at 4pm when all our contributors got out of school," he says. "I knew more about what the NME should be doing when I was 16 than when I was actually working for it."

And he wanted it all new, fresh, young, vibrant - like monkeyglands for the brain:

"Nothing in this magazine comes from the PR industry - it's basically Peaches and other young journalists raving about stuff they love," Brown adds. "My main criterion was - if I've heard of it, it probably shouldn't go in. I had doubts about interviewing Billy Childish because he's been around for such a long time, but Peaches said he was Kurt Cobain's big influence and we should feature him, so we did."

I think this probably sums up the hopeless lack of direction that characterised the magazine. Setting a bar of 'if I've heard of it, it doesn't go in' is a lumpen idea, but at least it's an idea.

But then if Billy Childish gets in because he influenced Kurt Cobain, wasn't that relying on James Brown having heard of Kurt Cobain? So surely that feature would have failed on two counts, then. To say nothing of this being 2008, which was fourteen years after Cobain had shot himself; which would have been before the birth of most of the people Brown wanted to be writing for, never mind reading, the title.

The whole thing had somehow crawled out of an MTV reality show, where Peaches had shown real people what it was like to work in a magazine. This was, in itself, a strange concept, like calling in George Osborne to teach people to do cardiac massage. After the series had finished, Brown and Geldof just thought the idea of the magazine was too good to not pour money into launching.

Despite all the signs, it did make it to a second issue, although as the magazine's staff was quick to point out to the Guardian's Marina Hyde, Peaches somehow had become detached:

All of a sudden, my correspondent declines to be drawn any further, and a formal statement from Andy Varley, co-publisher of Disappear Here, arrives in my inbox.

"Peaches is very much involved in the magazine," this reads, "and is a director and equal shareholder of Disappear Here Ltd along with myself and James Brown. Peaches, James and I made a joint decision that she should not be listed in the editorial credits for the Spring/Summer edition as she has not written anything and Peaches would never attribute her name to something which wasn't her own work. The editorial team at Disappear Here are incredibly talented and we are all exceptionally pleased with the current issue."

Varley, besides being one of the backers of Disappear Here, was also managing Peaches.

So, would she back on board for issue three?

Sadly, the world would never find out, for although the website is still there, it looks like everything, um, disappeared sometime around the Spring of 2009.

Wonderfully, you can still buy a subscription - there's a Paypal form waiting to take your money - but given the long hiatus between issues I thought I should first find out when the third edition would be coming, so emailed the subscriptions email address to find out.

After a few short hours, a reply:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of
its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following addresses
failed:

dan@disappearheremag.com:
quota exceeded

But there are signs of life, for there on the front page is a "latest comment" - and, why, it appears to date from this week:

Alas, though, arriving at the comments area the visitor feels the lurching disappoint of the submarine crew in On The Beach when they discover the radio signals they've been chasing are little more than a mechanical echo of a dead world:

To be fair, the 19th of October 2009 was actually a Monday, so it's only a little bit misleading.

Still, the fact you can still send them money for the next three issues must mean there's still some life there, right? I mean, James Brown and Peaches Geldof wouldn't leave a website up with a cash register on take money if they didn't intend to make good on the deal, would they?

But for now, the website says Hello, but the whole escapade seems to have long since completed its goodbyes:

Retiring: Alan Lewis

A find farewell to Alan Lewis, a man who quietly worked his way through many of the UK's best-beloved and now-defunct music papers.

UK Press Gazette counts them all out:

Lewis started his career as a local newspaper sub before moving to Melody Maker in 1969 from where he went on to become the founder-editor of Black Music and Kerrang!, editor of Sounds, NME, No1 and Vox.

He was also instrumental in the launch of Loaded and Uncut, the former of which he acted as editor-in-chief, and had a hand in the development of Family History Monthly.

Lewis has been editing Record Collector magazine, which he has carefully positioned away from being a magazine solely about collecting circles of plastic; as a result, there's still a title to hand on. Ian McCann - a name whiskery NME readers will recognise as an equally solid pair of hands - will take up the editor's job when Lewis retires.

Downloadable: Talk About The Passion

There's a new edition of Talk About The Passion out, and this one is online-only. Which might be part of a convoluted plot to turn the whole thing into an iPad native app behind a mandated paywall; you'd have to ask Charles Arthur about that.

What we do know is that it's got some lovely bits in it - Saint Etienne, Earl Brutus and a loving memorial bit on Frank Sidebottom. And other odds and ends, too. Download it now. Go on.

Beyonce: If you liked it, you should have put a fact-checker on it

An email from Columbia records - sent to seemingly everybody in the world - comes with an attached pdf containing an apology from Neon Magazine:

Statement

We do have serious doubts in the truth of many statements of the interview of Ms Beyonce Knowles, published in Neon, issue January/2010.

The article was written by the freelancer Ingo Mocek. The editors-in-chief have confronted Ingo Mocek with these doubts. Ingo Mocek was not able to verify certain statements, particularly the statement regarding a marriage contract of Ms Knowles.

Therefore, we assume the interview did not take place as claimed by Ingo Mocek.

The interview claimed that Beyonce and Jay-Z had signed a prenuptial agreement worth 10 million dollars if the marriage lasted ten years, with an extra million added every twelve months after that. Oh, and that she'd not actually told Jay-Z she wanted kids - because that's the sort of thing you bring up during an interview with a German-language magazine - and that Jay-Z didn't realise women don't always wear make-up and high heels. "I want to sit around at home, sometimes in sweatpants" Beyonce "told" Mocek. None of this, apparently, struck the editors at Neon as in any way odd for a woman like Beyonce to be sharing in this way, through this channel.

Neon have apologised, and told Ingo that, perhaps, it might be better if he didn't turn up with any more things for them to print.

This Is Fake DIY go all papery

Who would be as mad as to launch a paper publication into this economy? Besides The London Weekly team, of course, who are probably already certified.

This is Fake DIY aren't mad, but they are joining in with a paper frenzy in the shape of a half-newspaper, half-fanzine, half-freesheet affair.

Issue 0 is available in a limited run, read-and-pass-on format on the streets of London; issue 1 proper is due soon.

(Sidenote: Underground, the much-missed Sounds & Record Mirror semi-fanzine sister monthly, also launched with an issue 0 - distributed free with Sounds. I seem to recall this was the home of The Shend On The Run. It had a limited but lively life, before closing and reappearing-sideways as the glossy Offbeat.)

Music Week reflects readership's misunderstanding of online pricing

Music Week has launched an iPhone app, inviting you to tap into its music industry reporting wherever you happen to be. And how much does it want for this?

£9.99.

Well, that's a little heavy - a tenner for a single newspaper app, but it is working in a specialist sector, and times are hard, and I guess ten pounds is just about fair... what? What's that you're saying, Gordon Macmillan?

The £9.99 price gives readers access to the music trade title's content for 30 days. Then it is time to renew.

One hundred and twenty pounds a year?

Sure, they're writing for people working in an industry which is desperate to believe that the price of what they sell online should go up, rather than down, but even hardened music executives might spot that this is chronically overpriced.

The Spectator is pushing it, but at least they only try to shake you down for £2.39. Maybe - in the same way record companies have forgotten they don't need to charge for pressing, distribution and warehousing with online deals - Music Week has forgotten to pass the savings in newsprint and ink and vans and retail mark-up onto the consumer.

[via @simonth]

Downloadable: Animal Collective

Animal Collective have guest-edited issue 65 of Fader, and - in the spirit of the season - the results of their efforts are available for free download.

Folding magazines: Vibe "saved"

Vibe magazine has been supposedly been saved.

Sort-of:

InterMedia Partners have purchased the brand, and plan to relaunch it through the creation of a "Vibe lifestyle network", reports allhiphop.com.

There are vague plans that there will also be a quarterly magazine somewhere down the line, but it all sounds a bit like the online "resurrection" of Woolworths from where I'm sitting.