01 March 2006

Spin Magazine sold for $5 million

Via Tiny Mix Tapes:

"The much speculated future of Spin magazine was answered Tuesday. According to the New York Post, Spin was sold for the shocking bargain-basement price of $5 million. (To put this in perspective, TMT is worth over $15 million.) The struggling brand was purchased by the San Francisco-bsed McEvoy Group and Hartle Media. The outgoing owner, Miller Publishing's CEO Robert Miller, will keep control of the hip-hop mag Vibe, for now, at least, which is also partly owned by Quincy Jones."
My question is: who cares?! Wait, I guess I do since I'm posting about it...but really, anybody out there still have a subscription to Spin? Does the magazine have a future? Does print media have a future?

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

According to BVegan, Spin is staying in NYC despite the sale

Matt said...

yes, i noticed that and changed the post here to reflect that. i can't believe Spin was only worth $5 million.

Colleen said...

Yeah the new ish is all My Chemical Romance-this and Fallout Boy-that, but it was the readers' poll results. I think the readers even named the kid in My Chemical Romance as sexiest guy?!?!?! He looks like Billy Corrigan Junior Junior, which is to say, the kid from Small Wonder.

Anonymous said...

if print media is dead, um, then i guess i'm in the wrong program at school. oh well.
and about my chemical romance, what is up with spin? that infuriates me....does ultragrrrl have a say as to what goes on every cover? its like killers killers fallout boy my chemical romance killers my chemical romance...gross

Matt said...

gross indeed...and of course i don't think print media is dead, they just need to re-think the way they do things and i'm curious what folks who clearly are reading online media think about such things

Anonymous said...

i still read spin from time to time, but if they keep putting shitty bands on the cover, i will stop reading their work.

but i do use them for collage purposes and i'd rather make beautiful things out of ugly messes!

by the way, i never really knew spin was for sale or what was going on. shocker!

Anonymous said...

as for the future of print media, there will still be a desire to love magazines that thrive on the printing press. i buy at least more than ten magazines a month and read them from cover to cover and use them as resources. and there are many wonderful glossies that can be found in bookstores and newsstands that are worthy of reading (under the radar, rockpile, filter, etc.)

and i think that's what keeps the indie kids coming to the newsstands every month. the desire to have a magazine that features bands on a monthly (or bi-weekly) basis will always be there. at least for me. :)

Zack said...

I'm not a huge Spin fan either, but a few years back, when I was in 8th grade, I did have a subscription and read it voraciously. This was before I discovered Pitchfork, CMG, and wonderful music bloggers like yourself, and I'd moved past corporate radio, so it was my main source of music info. They generally did a good job of namedropping classic indie bands - I discovered Pavement, the Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, and a whole lot more thanks to Spin. But yeah, by now it's certainly gotten unreadable.

Kaufman said...

I don't know about the future of the magazine in question nor does my lack of insight matter in this instance. However, back in the days when I was required to pay through my teeth for an education of the tertiary kind, I stated categorically in a tutorial discussion that the print medium would become superfluous before the turn of the century.

At the time, it was a bold and radical statement, much like the former Australian prime minister who proclaimed that there would be no child living in poverty by the year 1990 (and look how much beer he's consumed since then); one I was proud to call my own. It was harpooned with stares of disbelief and unintelligible mumbling, to which I replied emphatically with the timeless words: 'Mark my words, people.'

Therein lay my mistake. Six years past my foreshadowed deadline, I'm 100% certain about one thing: I was wrong.

The average Joe and Joeline want their daily newspaper and their weekly magazine because they're still confused about the exact nature and definition of technophobia. If they can't go to the cinema to get their weekly dose of propaganda news reels then where can they go?

Isn't it better to be on top of yesterday's news rather than today's?

Well, I think not, but most people do.

Anonymous said...

to address a few things here...
a. matt's comment about 5 million, yes that was lost to me at first but holy shit, 5 million for spin???? that seems absolutely inconceivable to me (not to sound like the guy in princess bride)
b. zack's comments....i agree with them wholeheartedly, i used to get alot of great bands/knowledge/ideas from Spin, which i suppose is why i'm being so hard on Spin now..for so long i relied on them to serve as some alternate source of information and so their downward spiral to shitsucking irrelevance over the last few years and now the whole idea that they're going "younger" just makes me very upset.

Anonymous said...

Maybe they're not getting "younger" Mike, maybe you're just getting "Older."