When did you last buy a newspaper? When did you last pay money to access and read words that weren't printed in a book? When did you last actually purchase music after reading a magazine review? When did you last circumvent a publication's online paywall or plea for financial support by clicking on the 'I'll do this later' option or by finding the same story on a free site elsewhere?
The answers to the above questions might help to explain why, after publishing its monthly music bible for 34 years, Q magazine will publish its final issue on 28th July 2020. The coronavirus pandemic is being blamed for the periodical's demise. Yet given the decline in its circulation since 2001 and the hope that new editor Ted Kessler - who arrived in 2017 - should not be the magazine's last; the pandemic has seemingly only accelerated, not precipitated, the inevitable. Though I have boxes of back issues, I've not bought Q in years.
I now subscribe to a different music magazine (Classic Pop) that took a printing break during lockdown but is now publishing again. Yet increasingly, I read reports in its pages that I've read online weeks earlier. If fewer people are prepared to pay for content, the only way for magazines to survive is to provide something so distinctive and exclusive that it can compete with the Internet. And even if that's possible, isn't the notion of a magazine per se — a one-stop shop, a greatest hits compilation of information — an anachronism, anyway?
As we mourn the passing of a relationship with a publication that was forged in our formative years, we cannot deny that this fondness is based on nostalgia. The end of Q magazine is only further evidence of the same cultural shift that has witnessed a devaluation of recorded music and the public's engagement in it — a sentiment shared by the musician Fatboy Slim in Jennifer Otter Bitterdike's 2017 book Why Vinyl Matters: A Manifesto From Musicians And Fans (sourced from the NME's online edition):
"Music has pretty much become disposable, which is a shame because vinyl was never disposable. Even if you got bored with your records, you put them in a charity shop and someone else would buy them. Digital music doesn't have that iconic status; it's not the central object of desire, translated from the people who make the music to the people who listen to it."
If the relationship between creator and consumer has irretrievably broken down, why should anyone (digital natives, especially) be concerned with the views of music journalists? Arguably, only digital immigrants will recognise what is lost when a magazine disappears. In the days before pithy comments or peer recommendations on social media reigned supreme; magazines really were the creators and curators of public taste. Combined with TV appearances by musicians, they also created mythologies and physical presences that savvy new artists now cultivate themselves online, bypassing the bygone print media of their parents' generation.
Thanks Q and good night.
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ReplyDeleteI love this. Well said. Q informed my formative years and even today I still hear music and will say, "that's a real Q album, that"! Much of my late teens and early 20s were spent sourcing records or cds that received that rare thing, the Q 5* review, Grant Lee Buffalo being one such example, Tim Finn, Before and After, described by Q as, "the cover may be too smart for its own good, but the music is just smart enough." The Q recommended section, 9 albums at the back, was great and the interviews made me want to read rock journalism. I will miss Q. Another part of my youth gone.
ReplyDeleteLovely piece, although as you say, Q's demise is yet another sad indicator of the devaluation of recorded music and the public's engagement with it.
ReplyDeleteGreat piece, I really enjoyed it.