How Fanzines Can Save the Magazine Industry

• DOWNLOAD | BOWERBIRDS “Chimes” Upper Air, 2009

Jonah Weiner’s recent essay for Slate — “Spinning in the Grave: The Three Biggest Reasons Music Magazines are Dying” — stands out as the first coherent appraisal of the subject that I’ve read, largely because it takes the industry to task not only for its antiquated business model, but for its actual value to the reader. “It’s a valid point that the professional critic still wields an aura of authority rare in the cacophonous world of online music,” Weiner contends, “but between taste-making blogs and ever-smarter music-recommendation algorithms like Apple Genius and Pandora, the critic’s importance is being whittled down.”

Indeed, as a cursory glance at my hard drive can attest, traditional music journalism hasn’t turned me on to a new record in a long time: I decided that the new A-ha record was pretty great thanks to a heads up from Torr, I discovered The Temper Trap after hearing “Sweet Dispositions” in the movie 500 Days of Summer, I found the Marmaduke Duke from XFM’s streaming radio feed, and I came across Rod Thomas after Last FM convinced me that I’d love him. (I did.) The last time I bought an actual hard-copy magazine — this summer’s Green Day issue of Rolling Stone — I was merely anxious to stock up reading material for an upcoming road trip. With apologies to David Fricke, I’m pretty sure you won’t find any of it reprinted in this year’s Best American Magazine Writing collection.

So, yes. There is a problem. And Weiner does his best to answer the main question — what happened? — while smartly leaving the follow-up — what now? — open for discussion. I, for one, have a few ideas about this.

In 1989, I started a fanzine called Crucified. I was a 15-year-old kid with a love for punk rock and a desire to get involved; the act of making a fanzine was, as I saw it, both the process and the goal. My first issue was eight pages long, printed in navy blue ink, and totally dreadful. But I printed 200 copies of it, stood outside of CBGB with a backpack full of them, and after peddling them for a few weeks, earned roughly $100 in profit. I am telling you this because it is part of a greater truth about my history in self-publishing: I have never lost money on a fanzine. Ever. In fact, I was able to subsist on my income as a fanzine publisher in Manhattan for three years in the mid-1990s before I ceased publication to concentrate on writing music. This is all the more incredible when you consider that my latter-day fanzine, Anti-Matter, only published four issues.

The biggest difference between producing a fanzine and publishing a glossy magazine is scale, obviously, but the principles for keeping either of them financially afloat are similarly intangible and business-plan-proof. There were certainly qualified men with calculators who “crunched numbers” for glossies like Blender and Vibe, a magazine I once contributed to, and yet both of these titles recently fell under the axe — a fact that simply underscores the unlikely theory that magazine sustainability is a math problem. Weiner’s argument — that a combination of content quality, developing technology, and the overall music industry slump is to blame — is more probable, but I think it’s necessary to concede that the music press suffers from the same ailment that is killing the record industry: There has been, quite frankly, a noticeable estrangement from the very subject of their trade.

The very idea that we needed to create a new word — “fanzine” — to describe a magazine written by “fans” is at the root of the industry’s failure. At some point, lines were drawn between so-called critics and consumers, and while the quality of writing might differ between them, it has become clear in recent years — and especially with the advent of blogging — that there is no longer a considerable wedge between the quality of their insights. Take, for example, this line from a Bowerbirds review in Spin:

“For what it’s worth, I draw my breath from an ancient earth,” [singer Phil Moore] offers on “Chimes.” Somehow, it comes off like a solemn profession of love instead of a druid’s mantra.

Can this really count as insight? First of all, the basis of this observation stems from what Weiner calls the critic’s “tedious emphasis on lyrics” — as if every word is an autobiography. But even if we were to give the writer this license, how in the world did we just connect a lyric about nature to the imagined prayers of a Celtic magician? It’s close reading run amok. Compare this to a review of the same album from the blog Tiny Mix Tapes:

Delivered through lilting, carefree melodies, Moore’s words are easy to overlook: he doesn’t always enunciate (it took me a while to decipher “A nice young man” from “House of Diamonds”), and his voice is already so pleasant that one could find pleasure purely in its timbre. But ignoring Moore’s message is doing a great disservice to Upper Air. In just a few lines, opener “House of Diamonds” manages to convey the group’s espousal of anti-materialism more efficiently than the whole of Hymns for a Dark Horse did.

In this excerpt, TMT’s Lukas Suveg delivers everything I expect from an astute critic; his descriptions are lucid and his analysis is smart. Before reading this review, for example, I might never have contrasted Bowerbirds’ naturalism with an anti-materialist polemic, and yet this observation makes sense. Better yet, Suveg also successfully interjects himself into the review — I actually had a mental image of the reviewer trying to decipher the lyrics — creating a slight, but effective impression that establishes an important point of connection between writer and reader. This connection, as tenuous as it might be, has been discouraged — and, in many cases, discarded — by modern magazine editors much to the detriment of the industry itself. Which is why the first thing that the glossies can learn from fanzine culture is that real-life readers are loyal to real-life writers.

My point here is that the criteria that music lovers have come to equate with valuable journalism and criticism has changed, and we’re hewing closer to the common speak of fanzine writing than the metaphor-rich hyperbole of the traditional journalist. In other words, we don’t need no druids, let the motherfuckers burn.

Because every good think piece deserves a list, I came up with five things that mainstream publishers could learn from my experience as a fanzine editor and freelance magazine writer. Having worked in both mediums for several years, I’d argue that this list is more empirical than hypothetical. Whether the industry as a whole is too far gone to appreciate such conventional wisdom, however, remains to be seen.

I. PAY FAIRLY, PAY PROMPTLY, AND PAY IT FORWARD
I know of several fantastic music writers who ended their careers for financial reasons — that’s no surprise. This is not a well-paying business for most of us. Which is all the more reason that a magazine’s accounting department should be bending over backwards to pay their writers within the 30-day window that is standard in the field. Thirty means 30 — not 60 or 90 or ten months later, which is the longest it ever took for me to get paid by one unnamed magazine.

Anti-Matter was one of the few fanzines of its day to pay its photographers. It wasn’t much, and out of gratitude, I always made sure to pay it forward — by recommending these photographers who helped me out for better paying jobs, by giving them free records or concert tickets, by doing anything I could to help them out. Likewise, in the mid-90s, I wrote a series of articles for the hugely influential Ego Trip magazine for free; editor Sacha Jenkins paid it forward by giving me paid work as soon as he was named Music Editor at Vibe.

The point here is that writers and photographers should be respected and properly compensated for their work. If we are to be held to our deadlines for providing copy, the powers that be should be prepared to deliver the check. You’d think this was a given, but it’s not.

II. THE MUSIC INDUSTRY IS NOT ONLY A BUSINESS, IT’S A COMMUNITY
The critic vs. consumer divide was created largely because music writers got their records for free. As a result, writers began developing an exclusive lexicon that confirmed their self-created status as harbingers of privileged information; the longer this persisted, the more the consumer’s opinion was devalued. With the depersonalization of the average record-buyer complete, the depersonalization of the average critic was inevitable.

Of course, this has all become a moot point with the internet era, where music is free, on demand, and often well in advance of its official release date.

When the first issue of Anti-Matter came out in the fall of 1993, I went on a U.S. tour with my band and stood at the door of each club, every night, to sell them. I could have just laid the fanzines on a table and walked backstage, but it was important to me that people associated my work with a real person. It was also important that I talked to my potential readers: I asked them what kind of music they liked, what kinds of issues were important to them, if there were any good vegetarian restaurants in town. As a result, many of these kids also became friends and distribution centers for future issues of Anti-Matter: they invested in me, because I invested in them. This is the community model.

When Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner told Charlie Rose that the difference between his magazine’s web presence and Facebook is that the latter is “kind of a teen thing,” it became painfully obvious that Wenner is out of touch with the internet’s amazing capability to create and sustain the superior community model that might very well save his flailing brand. It has the capability to re-personalize us all.

III. CREATE AN ALTERNATIVE AESTHETIC
Question: Why do magazines look the way they do? Answer: Because that’s the way it’s always been. This answer is not good enough anymore.

I knew I wanted my fanzine to look crisp and modern, but I also knew that the money to publish a full-color glossy magazine was not there. The solution, I realized, was not a linear step forward or backward, but a parallel move: I published on flat paper stock and cultivated a design that would work in that context. The end result was a combination of early Quark Express typeset design and cut-and-paste art — a mixed aesthetic that reflected the mixed medium I wanted to create. I’ve often heard people argue over whether Anti-Matter was a “fanzine” or a “magazine,” and that was kind of the point.

The last magazine to truly experiment with medium and design was Raygun; it failed largely because you couldn’t really read it. But that doesn’t mean we should just give up. Much like the record industry realized that it needed to provide extra value for CD buyers, the magazine industry needs to give us something we are compelled to buy for its aesthetic value. Otherwise, we will continue to eschew the print for the online edition.

IV. A BRAND IS NOT FACELESS
This point embodies many of the previous points, but stands out because it underlines the myriad of missed opportunities for the magazine industry.

Anti-Matter did not become a brand by design. I admit that. At the same time, it was not entirely an accident. I had a concept for a voice, an aesthetic, and an interview style, but none of these were contrived — they were angles of my personality. Similarly, when we think about “rock star” music journalists — and I might put folks like Touré, Chuck Klosterman, and my friend and up-and-comer Jessica Hopper on that list — we should understand that we remember their names because we remember their voices. Each of them is idiosyncratic in their approach to criticism and writing, and none of them merely blend in with their respective magazines. They bring what I call “the jolt”: If I begin reading their stories without having read their bylines, I almost always stop by the third paragraph to see who wrote this. They will (and already have) go on to pen books and essays — with or without the music magazines — because their brand is themselves.

At this point, music magazines have not figured out how to foster and harvest that kind of energy and talent and charisma to their benefit — and, consequently, their own collective brands are becoming irrelevant. In contrast, I’ve continued to use the Anti-Matter “brand” wherever a suitable project might present itself: I’ve produced T-shirts, a compilation album, an anthology book, and a weekend of sold-out Anti-Matter benefit concerts. I’ve been careful to develop trust and to preserve that trust, because I am quite literally the face of this brand.

In other words, fanzine writers are willing to put our integrity, reputation, and facial recognition on the line for our work. Can most newsstand magazine publishers truly say the same thing?

V. IT’S THE MUSIC, STUPID
I realize that advertising dollars are the gasoline that moves the car forward. But gasoline alone will not fill your car with people for the road trip. Nobody was reading Blender to find out about JetBlue’s Caribbean flights or the new flavor of Absolut — and maybe that’s why, in the end, no one was reading Blender. We can’t forget the reason we’re publishing in the first place.

This, of course, makes the assumption that we’re all writing about music because we love it, and because sharing our love for music gives us the kind of satisfaction that $100,000 for a back cover advertisement will never bring. If you are currently employed by the music magazine industry and this idea does not resonate with you, then might I make a sixth and final suggestion: Quit your day job and start a fanzine. You can have your desk back when you’ve finally figured it out.

Photo: Peras & Manzanas