Quote:
Originally posted by JackSpratts
Mass-market music magazines like Rolling Stone and others will find the post Napster world as hard to negotiate as the mass-market music companies - the magazines need a monolithic industry as much as the frantic labels do even if they go to great lengths to hide the fact. If the song industry collapses into a scene of scattered factions where everyone makes and consumes their own tunes for smaller and smaller individual audiences the need for national or international magazines covering a handful of "power bands" will diminish or collapse. They can’t possibly cover a diluted worldwide market from a couple of central offices but even if they could the ‘zine would be thousands of pages long. So why buy it if 98% of the contents are as irrelevant to you as the record companies you ignore? I see this ad as a cry for help to the labels, a "Hey guys we're all in this together and we've got a good thing going here so don't f*ck it up!"... camouflaged by anger and Rolling Stone faux nihilism.
- js.
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Well put, as always, Jack.
Ok, this makes sense. This is
Rolling Stone trying to preserve their psuedo anti-Establishment credentials and send a message to the industry at the same time. Logically, they probably like nothing better than to preserve the old status quo. They have as much of a vested interest in a homogenized market dominated by a handful of artists as do the radio stations and record industry.