The news came down this week that the pioneering alt-country (whatever that is) magazine,
No Depression will cease publication of their fine magazine, citing dwindling advertising revenues due to a paradigm shift in the music industry.
This came as a bit of a surprise to me given the wide acclaim in which ND is held, their strong and loyal readerships and what I thought was pretty strong advertising support. But their reasons were not new to me at all. They are the very same reasons we ceased print publication of
Honest Tune late last year.
For us, and for No Depression and other smaller, niche music magazines, the bread-and-butter of ad revenue was from record companies. For us, that mostly meant independent record companies as we always made a point to cover smaller, up-and-coming acts. So as it became harder and harder for record companies to actually sell records the marketing budgets started to shrink. First on the list of budget cuts was print advertising, and on the top of that list were the Honest Tunes of the world. I guess No Depression was next on the list. The independent artists (wisely) turned to cheaper and in some cases free promotional tools like myspace and email lists and street teams, leaving less advertising revenue to support printing and mailing a magazine.
But it's not just advertising budgets. Printing costs were going up. Postage costs were going up. Retail shelf space was harder to come by with the conglomeration of distributors, and the
very best retail space--the shelves of independent record stores--were disappearing too as the download generation grew to represent a larger percentage of the music consuming public.
Is this bad for music? I think so. The nature of the internet is such that people get bogged down in the most specialized of interests. You search things out and find like minded viewpoints in the storm of opinions and misinformation. Picking up a magazine on a whim and finding yourself comfortable in a community that expands your horizons was a little different. Mass media conforms to the lowest common denominator, and while magazines like
Harp, and
Paste, offer some hope, it seems that the end result of this will be back where we were--the have artists with the big budgets and the big press being easily available to the marketable public at large, and the have-not artists relegated to their corner of the Internet.
Here's the announcement from
ND:
NO DEPRESSION MAGAZINE TO CEASE PUBLISHING AFTER MAY-JUNE ISSUE No Depression, the bimonthly magazine covering a broad range of American roots music since 1995, will bring to an end its print publication with its 75th issue in May-June 2008.
Plans to expand the publication's website (www.nodepression.net) with additional content will move forward, though it will in no way replace the print edition.
The magazine's March-April issue, currently en route to subscribers and stores, includes the following note from publishers Grant Alden, Peter Blackstock and Kyla Fairchild as its Page 2 "Hello Stranger" column:
Dear Friends:
Barring the intercession of unknown angels, you hold in your hands the next-to-the-last edition of No Depression we will publish. It is difficult even to type those words, so please know that we have not come lightly to this decision.
In the thirteen years since we began plotting and publishing No Depression , we have taken pride not only in the quality of the work we were able to offer our readers, but in the way we insisted upon doing business. We have never inflated our numbers; we have always paid our bills (and, especially, our freelancers) on time. And we have always tried our best to tell the truth.
First things, then: If you have a subscription to ND, please know that we will do our very best to take care of you. We will be negotiating with a handful of magazines who may be interested in fulfulling your subscription. That is the best we can do under the circumstances.
Those circumstances are both complicated and painfully simple. The simple answer is that advertising revenue in this issue is 64% of what it was for our March- April issue just two years ago. We expect that number to continue to decline.
The longer answer involves not simply the well-documented and industrywide reduction in print advertising, but the precipitous fall of the music industry. As a niche publication, ND is well insulated from reductions in, say, GM's print advertising budget; our size meant they weren't going to buy space in our pages, regardless.
On the other hand, because we're a niche title we are dependent upon advertisers who have a specific reason to reach our audience. That is: record labels. We, like many of our friends and competitors, are dependent upon advertising from the community we serve.
That community is, as they say, in transition. In this evolving downloadable world, what a record label is and does is all up to question. What is irrefutable is that their advertising budgets are drastically reduced, for reasons we well understand. It seems clear at this point that whatever businesses evolve to replace (or transform) record labels will have much less need to advertise in print.
The decline of brick and mortar music retail means we have fewer newsstands on which to sell our magazine, and small labels have fewer venues that might embrace and hand-sell their music. Ditto for independent bookstores. Paper manufacturers have consolidated and begun closing mills to cut production; we've been told to expect three price increases in 2008. Last year there was a shift in postal regulations, written by and for big publishers, which shifted costs down to smaller publishers whose economies of scale are unable to take advantage of advanced sorting techniques.
Then there's the economy...
The cumulative toll of those forces makes it increasingly difficult for all small magazines to survive. Whatever the potentials of the web, it cannot be good for our democracy to see independent voices further marginalized. But that's what's happening. The big money on the web is being made, not surprisingly, primarily by big businesses.
ND has never been a big business. It was started with a $2,000 loan from Peter's savings account (the only monetary investment ever provided, or sought by, the magazine). We have five more or less full-time employees, including we three who own the magazine. We have always worked from spare bedrooms and drawn what seemed modest salaries.
What makes this especially painful and particularly frustrating is that our readership has not significantly declined, our newsstand sell-through remains among the best in our portion of the industry, and our passion for and pleasure in the music has in no way diminished. We still have shelves full of first-rate music we'd love to tell you about.
And we have taken great pride in being one of the last bastions of the long-form article, despite the received wisdom throughout publishing that shorter is better. We were particularly gratified to be nominated for our third Utne award last year.
Our cards are now on the table.
Though we will do this at greater length next issue, we should like particularly to thank the advertisers who have stuck with us these many years; the writers, illustrators, and photographers who have worked for far less than they're worth; and our readers: You.
Thank you all. It has been our great joy to serve you.
GRANT ALDEN
PETER BLACKSTOCK
KYLA FAIRCHILD
No Depression published its first issue in September 1995 (with Son Volt on the cover) and continued quarterly for its first year, switching to bimonthly in September 1996. ND received an Utne Magazine Award for Arts & Literature Coverage in 2001 and has been nominated the award on two other occasions (including in 2007). The Chicago Tribune ranked No Depression #20 in its 2004 list of the nation's Top 50 magazines of any kind.
Artists who have appeared on the cover of No Depression over the years include Johnny Cash (2002), Wilco (1996), Willie Nelson (2004), Ryan Adams' seminal band Whiskeytown (1997), the Drive-By Truckers (2003), Ralph Stanley (1998), Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint (2006), Gillian Welch (2001), Lyle Lovett (2003), Porter Wagoner (2007), and Alejandro Escovedo (1998, as Artist of the Decade).
*****
Here's a pretty good piece from
NPR
