Are magazines the next music album?

Nobody has suffered from the advent of the internet as the music business. Endless millions of dollars have been lost in revenue, as people have shared music among themselves free of charge. And it’s not getting better.

John Batelle links the music business to his childhood-memories of listening to vinyl records on his parents stereo, when he was a child. And he notices that his own children are using magazines the same way today, as he was using albums when he was a kid. Thus he asks the very valid question whether the magazine business will go the same way as the music business did?

Personally I don’t think that they will completely, but we will see a radically different magazine market than the one we’re seeing today.

First of all I think we will see all non-focused commodity-content magazines go away. The competition from the internet will be too big, and there will be no real differentiator to keep these magazines afloat. They will simply not be needed anymore.

Second, I think we will see more nichebased magazines which will digg even deeper into their respective niches. The digging will have to be so deep that a magazine can claim real ownership on the niche. In other words there won’t be room for a lot of magazines within one specific niche. My guess will be 2 magazines for every niche depending on language territory.

Finally we will see magazines develop distinctive personalities. “Personality goes a long way,” they say in the old Tarantino movie ‘Pulp Fiction’, and for magazines they’re right. Magazines with personalities - including on the staff - will have a great story to tell their readers in order for them to buy the magazine. And that is going to be key.

To summarize I think we will see a consolidation of magazines, where all mainstream magazines will eventually go away, and we will be left with perhaps a lot of very targeted magazines but only one or two within every niche. The burden on the magazine to stand out will be so huge that that in itself will be a limiting factor for competition and drive development in this direction.