Ailing music magazines are bought out
mainThe Mark Allen Group, which bought Gramophone for a proverbial shilling in 2013, has today taken over all the assets of the Rhinegold stable.
These include such titles as Classical Music magazine, Opera Now, Music Teacher and International Piano.
Let’s see if they can kick some life into a suffering print-mag field.
The news has yet to be announced on the Rhinegold website.
Print publications in the classical music world are not doing well, unsurprisingly. There was a good Italian magazine called Amadeus which was in al the newsstands a couple of years ago but was in Rome a couple of months ago and nowhere to be seen. Its website says it exists but clearly rather weakly.
Is there a “world” [special interest] where print publications ARE doing well? I don’t think classical music is uniquely cursed in this respect. There are many fine magazines I no longer see on newsstands … mostly because I rarely see any newsstands!
Fanfare Magazine survives because it always was, and still is, pretty much a one-man shop: Joel Flegler.
The *only* classical music magazine you need to subscribe to: The AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE http://www.americanrecordguide.com/ Totally independent, all expenses paid for by subscription fees, writers who can actually *write* and express real opinions, not what they need to say to stay in the good graces of artists’ agents, PR firms, or record companies. And an editorial staff who knows music and maintains the standards of the English language.
Subscription is LESS than 50 bucks a year, and yes, they take international subscribers. Sure, there’s lots of free stuff on the Internet, but you’ve got to constantly evaluated the credibility of stuff you’re reading. ARG puts it together all in one place.
If you’re done with physical media, you can read ARG online, but you have to subscribe – they can’t afford to give away the milk for free.
I subscribe to both Fanfare and ARG. If I had to cut back to one publication only, it would be Fanfare in a heartbeat. Consistently better reviews and more of them (also archived online), plus an editor that leaves the reviews to the reviewers.
A sad sign of the times. Vale Gramophone. I subscribed to it once for over 20 years.
Opera Now is a really good magazine and I subscribe to it. I hope it’s safe from closure.
The tendency to condemn music information into the abstraction of the internet makes it dependent upon electricity. Also, it gives the content an ephemeral character. Music magazines are not really suited to the internet, which is better suited to the short term reaction type of content. It is not by all means certain that internet data will survive cultural and civilizational changes, what will remain of Western civilization if is disappears and there is no longer widely available electricity?