Rob Sheffield’s column in Blender now has a name: “Station To Station.” The former Rolling Stone writer, who recently joined Blender’s masthead, will be the first monthly columnist in the magazine’s short history. More »
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?
Yes, that’s right: If you buy a ticket to the May 2 New York City show by the Ellis Unit, which features Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner’s son, Gus, on guitar and vocals, you get a free subscription to Blender–a $9.97 value that brings your real price for the $20 ticket down to a mere $10.03 (plus service charges, which will probably mean that you’re out $20 anyway). I wonder if this means that Jann has no hard feelings about the Joe Levy decampment? Click the screenshot to enlarge.
As sorta-predicted by the Anono-Critic, pop omnivore and Love Is A Mix Tape author Rob Sheffield is leaving his post at Rolling Stone and following that mag’s former executive editor, Joe Levy, to Blender, where he’ll write a monthly column. More »
Blender, the mag where you come for the reviews and leave quickly before you see how bad the features are, has a list of the “20 biggest record company screw-ups of all time.” Some are obvious, like the industry’s inability to deal with the internet (No. More »
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 jump, a look at the new issue of Blender:
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, he contrasts the Britney Spears cover stories in the new issues of Rolling Stone and Blender:
The next issue of Blender will reportedly feature Britney Spears on its cover, with whatever poor sap who was contracted for the story spending “a month on a Britney safari, following her actions and talking with those closest to her.” More »