Just a few days ago, your host discussed the business of selling very expensive magazines. Now we're going to talk about the other end of the business, where they'll practically give you the magazine for the cost of postage.
A number of years ago, SC suffered one of the great heartbreaking moments of his life when Audio magazine closed shop. The year was 1999, and in December, a postcard arrived indicating that the publisher, Hachette Fillipachi, had seen fit to discontinue it in favor of transitioning all subscribers to the wholly worthless advertising forum known as Stereo Review, later known as Sound and Vision.
Audio was a magazine full of serious (albeit popularizing) articles about the recording process, electronics design, and real musicology. Its reviews frequently included meaningful discussion of the circuit topologies or acoustic design principles behind the components being discussed, and to read the magazine was to get a real education in a wide variety of subjects relating to music reproduction. It covered the whole range of electronics as well, from the cheapest budget gear to the most exotic, built-only-by-commission equipment. Stereo Review was a magazine of little intellectual heft, which would accede to any demand from an advertiser, and every issue offered the exact same lineup of articles: Budget components! How to hook up color-coded wires! A comparison test of three components which barely perform the same functions! While the point about the price range of gear may seem like mere snobbery, this choice was not merely a matter of appealing to a wider demographic, but of restricting editorial content to the sort of promotional buyer's guide material that will offend no potential mass-market advertiser. Practically every review in Sound and Vision begins with the familiar litany of "Manufacturer X makes the interesting flagship product Y, which costs in the kilobucks. Instead, today we'll be talking about their entry-level product Z, which is essentially indistinguishable from every other product on the shelves at Circuit City." When it so happens that Z suffers from egregiously bad design or manufacturing, and will display measurements so grossly out of line with conventionally-accepted performance parameters as to be unrecommendable (read: Bose), Sound and Vision simply labels the review a "User Report" instead of an "Equipment Report", and then says whatever the advertiser has paid for. This doesn't tell the consumer anything about why they should or shouldn't buy something; it just puts a third-party veneer on the manufacturers' advertising.
Since purely promotional material is worth far more to advertisers than to readers, Sound and Vision is practically given away to subscribers, for the nominal charge of about $0.83/issue, despite a cover price of $3.95. Audio did not discount nearly as much, and cost something like $2/issue for subscribers, and around $5 for a newsstand copy. SC had a three-year subscription to Audio at the time of its cancellation, and so Hachette Filipacchi converted it into an eight-year subscription to Sound and Vision. Using the perverse logic that your host had received a special nonrefundable discount rate that he never asked for, HF then declined to refund SC's subscription payment, and so he has been a reluctant subscriber to Sound and Vision ever since. He is eagerly awaiting 2008, when the nightmare will finally end. Despite pledges from the editorial staff at the time to expand coverage in order to accomodate all the new Audio readers, the mix of reviews -- and the seriousness of the coverage -- has never elevated at all from the lowest-common-denominator, anti-intellectual editorial content of the old Stereo Review.
The practice of offering such heavy discounts to subscribers makes it clear that subscription revenue is not at all the primary source of profitability for magazines of this ilk. Much the same is true of other hobbyist magazines; Car and Driver asks only $1/issue, Motor Trend also wants only $0.83, Popular Photography wants $1, and Home Theater has the nerve to actually ask for $1.08/issue. At these rates, it's painfully obvious that cover prices have little or nothing to do with an accurate representation of what it costs to run magazines.
Of course, it's not necessarily the case that a magazine is hopelessly editorially compromised just because it makes more from advertising than subscriptions. Car and Driver in particular is unafraid to write harsh reviews like this panning of the Ford Crown Victoria and Pontiac Bonneville by comparison to the new Chrysler 300. But such reviews just don't come along all that often in the audio press. More to the point, when you can't charge for a magazine, you can't devote many pages to actually interesting material, like interviews with musicians other than whoever the biggest labels are currently pushing, or discussions of the science involved. Unpaid articles don't pay the bills, after all.
It's not as though some of these laments haven't appeared here before. What is new, though, is the first sign of brutal honesty about the for-sale nature of editorial content in audio hobbyist magazines. Last week, Stereophile Ultimate AV (formerly Guide to Home Theater; henceforth UAV) -- by no means the worst offender in the consumer AV press, and one of the few to still publish more than the very most perfunctory measurements -- announced that it would be discontinuing its print operations, and becoming entirely a web-based operation. Primedia, the publisher, is doing no such thing with their other magazines in the same general topic area, like Home Theater, Stereophile, or the preposterously-named "Connected Guide to the Digital Home". Of the lot, Home Theater and UAV cover nearly identical beats, with much of the same range of gear (if not the same specific pieces), but Home Theater's measurements are always less comprehensive (this is not open to debate; compare a typical HT speaker measurement section with one from UAV), and their writers much less willing to make negative comments (this is admittedly a more subjective judgment). Both attract the same advertisers, in roughly the same proportions, as can be seen by flipping through issues of both. It would appear to make sense for a publisher that controls both to rationalize their operations by only producing one -- but the one they chose to save is the one which is far less editorially valuable to its readers. What can we conclude from this?
It isn't quite right to say that magazine content is valueless just because it is very cheap. After all, no listener pays for radio traffic reports, which many people find useful. And it's not as though that information is then biased to suit the agendas of advertisers who pay for it -- it would be absolutely nonsensical to contemplate the idea of advertisers paying traffic reporters to lie and suggest that only the roads leading to their businesses were relatively traffic-free. Nevertheless, it's clear from the practice of essentially giving away the magazines that both the editorial staff and the magazines' real clientele -- the advertisers -- believe the editorial content to be have little value apart from being a delivery mechanism for the ads. Looked at in that light, the highest return on investment is going to come from the magazine least likely to produce negative PR, and so it's no great shock that UAV is going while Home Theater stays. It is, however, a depressing loss as the popular audio press races to the bottom. SC would be greatly surprised to hear that the situation is much different in any other enthusiast media.
worth reading!!!
Posted by: littlemoney | April 03, 2007 at 02:29 AM
We all know the basic importance for it. Seems a little necessary for everyday.
Posted by: hollywood bistro | September 07, 2011 at 11:57 PM