The Death of Magazines (Survival in Print)

In our last posting I kissed off the 3 billion dollar US Magazine Industry. Pardon me for that. I’ve been huffing kale again. (See a previous issue of the New Yorker.) Having three actors who can essentially pull the plug on the whole game is not good news in any industry, however history provides us with few examples of consumer products which have disappeared simply due to distribution problems. If there’s a demand for something, someone will find a way to get it to the buyers. Moreover, the industry figures cited in our last blurb was for the retail magazine business only. The actual business of providing people with discretionary reading material, by whatever means, is still  healthy. If anything , the production of such is fairly booming. It’s the making money on it part which is proving problematic.

Current history may prove history wrong. In the Future Shock world in which we live, the once prominent Recording Industry has almost entirely evaporated. True, there still are such things as CDs and Radio Stations, but in a world wherein any boob can You Tube or ITunes publish their songs, who really needs record labels? Not too many people, it seems. Yet the labels and stars seem to have slogged on in their way. Whereas few of even the top acts are grossing much from the point of purchase sale to the consumer of “records” (a commodity which it is easy to avoid paying for), the actual performance of music is still quite lucrative. At least it is for the 1% of the acts who can make their livings that way. What we are seeing today, however, is that most of the drawing acts matriculated their way up through the old process. Our current live music scene is headlined by nostalgia performers, people fronting recreations of product that was popularized before the floor caved in on the old ways. Without an actual Recording Industry the minor leagues of the process have entirely dried up. No one is going to discover your garage band because there is little incentive to do so—there is no money in selling your recordings. Your actual product is now the sale of tickets to a live show, something that is hard to scale up. Cue the half naked dancing girls, which is all the Recording Industry is out to promote these days.

I am now sounding very old.

Woe to all of you aspiring Tangerine Dreams and Pink Floyds and Pretenders and Singer Songwriter types out there. Without pendulous boobies to shake, your future is relegated to shuffling through your samples on your Moogs by yourself for all eternity! The format of the “record”--or music created to be listened to in recorded format--is DEAD.     

(Did I mention that I hate musicians? It’s sort of a thing with me. I don’t hate them as a caste. And I don’t hate the idea of musicians. But most of the musicians that I have met have turned out to be low lifes.)

All of that said, all of what I just said could turn out to be total nonsense. The only people who truly miss the Recording Industry are cocaine dealers. But since the death of the industry, other than Nostalgia, all that’s been making the rounds are burlesque reviews. If there is a paying market for “Concept Albums” or pieces recorded by acts who don’t tour, it has yet to manifest. So the death of a particular format or product type is possible.

To get back to print, most people under the age of 20 have never read a magazine. Most people under the age of 30 do not read magazines or newspapers. To quote Frank Munsey, it looks like the entire periodical sector is the “dead cock in the pit.” We could state the obvious--that’s it’s all going to the web and what isn’t on the web will have little future.

There is a problem. The web is fine for text. It not fine for what we call in the trade “composition”—the interplay of text and words on the page. Due primarily to the different device outputs, one really can’t compose much on the web.  Given what passes for composition in most magazines, perhaps the whole art going the way of the Concept Album is due. Outside of comic books and comic strips, composition isn’t absolutely essential to most magazine genres.

It is perhaps in the examples of comic strips and comic books that we may see the future of print itself. Back in the late 1970s comic books started to be dropped by magazine distributors. The form had been in circulation free fall since the late 1950s and by the middle 1970s there was a question amongst retailers whether or not they justified shelf space. The number of titles in wide circulation began to taper off, with the children’s titles being swept away by cardboard story books first. Soon comics were starting to get rare.

So they left the newsstands. Today few newsstands or general retailers handle comic books. Their semi scarcity spawned a new distribution system, first focusing on used bookstores and then independent bookstores and then a category of specialty merchants. (Very long story made short.) Comic books also benefited from the fact that they recycled well in print. One story could appear across several formats—the comic book and reprint amalgamation of comic book stories in the form of Graphic Novels. (Again long story made short.) Although this might not be the most important factor in the survival of comic books, it is notable. Comic books have survived in print as print oriented entities.

Their elder cousins the comic strips have not fared anywhere as well. Devoid of newspapers, the three panel format has lost its relevance. Unlike the spot cartoon, which does double duty as a contained graphic element, the three panel sequence requires regular reader conditioning.  As it was constructed for the newspaper in the first place, the comic strip has gone into decline in tandem with its host medium. Although many comic strip characters remain in the public spotlight, no new strip has achieved widespread popularity in some time. I think there is still some demand for the comic strip in print form, but as it stands the form is as dead as rock music. No one is going to discover the next Garfield or Bloom County or Peanuts because no one is reading the newspapers.

It should be noted that the money in comic books and comic strips hasn’t been in their production.  The money is in licensing. When it comes to comic strips, the authors make more off reprint books, calendars and “other image merchandise” than they do off of syndication rights. Currently the syndication hole is shrinking and much of the net aggregation does not filter back to the creator. And the medium doesn’t translate to the computer, to be blunt. Again, all of this money goes out the window if no one ever sees the damn strip in the first place. That’s what’s happening now. Ask a twenty-something what his favorite comic strip is and he’ll probably ask you what a comic strip is.

That said, there’s no reason that this form can’t survive as Graphic Novel anthologies. It just hasn’t yet.

Other than comic books, the only other genre of magazines which seems to require a print presence are the fashion rags. Divorced of print, the clothing ads simply don’t have the same pop. Fragrance marketers also have no other mass advertising vehicle.  Being a delivery mechanism for these advertisers may be the salvation of the category. Unlike other genres, women of all ages are prone to patronizing the form. The die off in circulation has been somewhat less for the fashion magazines than for other publications. They have robust subscription rolls, so the continuation of the form is not in doubt. What remains in question is their distribution through newsstand outlets. The fashion mags cannot carry the entire industry. If all of the other categories collapse—as they have—there isn’t enough money in distribution of just fashion mags to justify their handling. So they may be headed to the bookstores also.

(My thinking is that they will wind up in the boutiques and hair salons. Newsstand scarcity gives the shops an opening they don’t have presently.)

All of this might happen sooner than later. Here history does provide us with a ready example. The entire pulp magazine distribution network essentially collapsed in the mid 1950s. In that case there were two distributors, as there are today. Like today, those two distributors had other lines of business. When one distributor folded, the other distributor sniffed the market and decided to drop pulps altogether. And the form never came back. We may be seeing a broader spectrum replay of the same dynamic. Given how little Newscorp and Time Life make off print distribution, it makes little sense for them to be the pack mules for the entire industry. At this point all of two people can end mass distribution of magazines as we know it. That’s not a good position for any industry to be in.

Coda: For those of you who missed our last post on this subject, a major magazine distributor recently folded shop without notice. This leaves the distribution of magazines in the United States dependent on two companies, subsidiaries of Newscorp (Fox TV) and Time Warner.