Wednesday, June 04, 2008

ARE MUSIC MAGS STILL RELEVANT IN 08?
Recently, I was in Borders for who knows what and I ended up over by the magazine section. Since, I refuse to spend my hard earns on a magazine that barely has two good articles that I would probably enjoy reading, I prefer to stand there in the aisle and read them. It's a perfect setting actually. The store lighting is wonderful, plus they have nice seating for us patrons that may want to stay a while. If you plan accordingly you can even purchase yourself a tasty piece of cake and a carton of ice cold skim milk and make an evening of it. So, as I was deciding on which magazine I was going to take a peek at, I ended up next to the music magazines. You know the usual suspects like Vibe, The Source, XXL, etc., so I picked up a Vibe first. After turning a few pages of ads and more ads, I found myself immediately disappointed. It wasn't just the annoying amount of ads that bothered me the most, but it was the lack of interesting compositions that were present. Vibe was not covering anything in between the covers that I didn't already know or cared about actually. I suddenly dropped the Vibe on the floor and picked up XXL. Yes, XXL was a litte more interesting actually, but again after a few minutes I was bored once again. It's ashame when the Eye Candy portion of the mag is its best feature. Before I knew it, I heard the XXL mag hit the Vibe on the floor. I almost picked up the Source, but ever since the scandals happen a few years ago I don't really F with them any more.

So, after my experience I have to ask, who is still buying music magazines and why? It really seems like a waste of money in my personal opinion. It's no secret that the World Wide Web a.k.a the INTERNET literally blows any weekly or monthly magazine out of the water. The internet provides anything you would want to know with lightning speed especially when it comes to the latest gossip, album covers, music, artists interviews, video vixens photos and anything else your interested in dammit. A paper magazine could never keep up with that type of information sharing. The internet is NOW, and the magazines are a lot LATER. The craziest thing to me is that the actual printed magazine articles and exclusive photos are eventually available for free online as well. Thinking about it even further, most of the time they hit the internet before the damn magazine even hits the shelves. So, I ask again, are music magazines still relevant in 2008? My answer is not just no, but HELL NO!

I hope someone can give me some good feedback on why they are still spending money on music magazines these days. I do like King Magazine and Black Swimsuit, but you can believe I'm not looking through those just for the articles...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey mate,

two mags i always go out of my way to get every month are xlr8r and urb.
i can get pretty much 100% of their content online but i'm still kinda old school and like to have the 'real deal' in front of me to flick through throughout the day to find some gems.
reading all that stuff online means i have many distractions in my browser so i prefer the actual mag. as it keeps me focused.
:)

DJ SoundNexx said...

@Cubik - What up my dude! I think that URB is a pretty dope mag as well actually. I still don't buy it, but it would be nice for some quality toilet read time...LOL.

Anonymous said...

I haven't purchased a magazine since 2000. Don't need em now...

Anonymous said...

I used to be a HUGE "Source" reader back in the days, but I hadn't dared to pick up an issue for years now.

rteer88