Passion plays
The biggest lesson magazine makers can learn from music makers
If there’s one thing that connects the vinyl revival and the print resurgence, it’s the passion of the people that buy records and magazines.
Music and magazine publishing have been following very different paths through the digital media revolution. But now, 30 years in, we’re starting to see them arrive at a similar place, and magazine makers have a lot to learn from the music makers’ journey.
Rise and fall
The vinyl revival has been building since the market’s low point in 2005, coincidentally the peak of the UK’s consumer magazine sales.
Through almost 20 years of vinyl recovery, print magazine sales have been declining.
What’s that about?
Different digital dynamics
Two things really… music streaming and digital advertising.
There’s a whole PhD treatise waiting to be written around the differing market dynamics that digital media inflicted on vinyl and print. For now, let’s just say digital hit music harder and faster, but magazines have finally caught up.
The economics of streaming have never been great if you’re an artist. Spotify pays about $0.005 per stream today and that’s way better than it used to be. I don’t know exactly what the profit on a vinyl record is, but I’ll bet it’s more than half a percent.
The literal bottom line is that music makers have seen vinyl as a way to claw back some cash for a very long time.
In contrast, magazine makers were seduced by decent digital advertising rates, supercharged by dreams of social-network scale and programmatic’s promise of ad sales on autopilot. Print became a cost to cut.
Today, with digital advertising rates crashing, the social networks turning their back on publishers and programmatic ads exposed as a ponzi scheme, the beancounters are starting to figure out that maybe print wasn’t a total write off after all.
Mixing it up
How has the music industry managed 17 straight years of growth in vinyl sales? By ticking all the boxes in the Print Profit formula I suggested in this newsletter a couple of weeks ago.
If streaming is the somewhat unpalatable wide end of the funnel, album sales are the tasty narrow end (Joanna just said to me, “Ew, don’t say ‘tasty narrow end’!”). Vinyl buyers are passionate, paying premium prices to collect beautifully presented artifacts they can display as a badge of belonging.
The music portfolio includes streaming, concerts, merchandise and $1.4 billion worth of vinyl in the US. Social media has played a part too. Artists are on there promoting their latest stuff, but the fans are too, spinning their disks, living their best Insta lives.
And when it comes to exploring possibilities, well, the list is endless. Multiple covers, limited-edition booklets, bonus tracks, 100% recycled coloured vinyl made from coloured vinyl scraps…
Analogue antidotes
What has changed more recently for both music and magazines is a rising sense of digital disillusionment.
Analogue media is coming to be seen as an antidote to the ‘tsunami of crap’ that the algorithms and AI have unleashed. Records set you up for serious listening more than ‘recommended for' you’ muzak; magazines set you up for serious reading rather than doomscrolling.
Writing in the Guardian, Quietus co-founder John Doran pointed out that if you were to listen to all of the 3.6 million new songs uploaded to streaming services every month you would need to have started listening in 1997 to catch up.
In magazines, misinformation and disinformation have pushed readers back to publishing brands they trust. And sometimes people just want a break from their screens. There’s a reason print had a good pandemic.
One big lesson
The biggest lesson that magazine makers can learn from music makers is that they must invest in making and marketing premium products that tap into the passions of their truest fans to own stuff.
Consider Record Store Day. Started in 2007 by a handful of fans to celebrate vinyl, the annual event has become a focal point for special releases that can’t be bought online.
The day breathes life into small independent stores across the country and gives artists a chance to launch their music in a unified way that brings fans together.
‘What led to the resurgence of vinyl?’, What Hi*Fi
Compare that to a magazine industry that struggles to admit that it makes magazines any more.
By talking print up, not down, and experimenting and innovating, print magazines absolutely have a place in the future of magazine publishing’s broader digital portfolio. But only if publishers are honest about what that means for them, their advertisers and maybe most of all, their readers.
More on honesty next week…
Peter
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