There was nothing better than to visit my local consumer news agency and finding my specially ordered copy of Computer Music Magazine had arrived, with its CD Rom full of crappy loops, questionable demo versions and even free soft synths and drum machines. Days of wonder...
Totally agree. Future Music was my gateway to synths & kit. They had great in depth interviews with artists, too. The CDs often had exclusive tracks from artists. Wish I still had all my old copies.
Early 2000's British magazines were miles ahead of US magazines, as far as value is concerned. The UK ones remained readable far longer than anything out of the USA. In addition, music mags out of the UK would have a lot more interesting music on a demo cd.
I guess in a way it's all relative, I've heard people complain about so many ads, but then I researched and was like back then it was all ads too! lol. It's all relative, somebody gonna get paid either way. You're definitely not wrong, it's just funny people think it was better back then (I did too) but it was still just overrun with advertising.
@@RumchugMusic RUclips influencers have a similar conflict of interest, since they have to keep up a continuous flow of free review units from manufacturers. And RUclips pays them from ads that are often from the manufacturers of gear they review. Same wine, different bottle.
@@noiretblancvie-afterhours I grew up Soviet Union, where you literally had to look or wait for the adds to see them. On TV there was one 15 minutes advertising block at 8:45-9:00 PM and that's it, as example.
Cool vid. Nick Bat from Sonic State has said something to the effect of "if we don't feature a review of a new, popular product that means something". Presumably that the product isn't good enough to be positive about it. As Sonic State's gear reviews are generally very positive as well. I could imagine a similar mechanism being in place back then in printed magazines. Besides not wanting to bite the hand that fed them.
Yes, you hit the nail on the head. These mags just don't review crap - especially when we considering the cost of producing and distributing a physical magazine! I think it's hard to relate to that nowadays
I seem to remember them not reviewing the Korg Prologue when it came out because of this, even though it sounds great, at the time it was criticised for lack of modulation/aftertouch and mentioning these glaring shortcomings in a review might come across too negative. You have to remember that these companies are paid to sell instruments and they have very close relationships with the brands that they sell. Magazines and online publications are funded almost entirely off advertisements paid for by these brands. So it's in their best interest to look at the positives with nearly every product they sell, so they can sell more products and keep the manufacturers happy. At the end of the day they will justify it by saying that they don't sell junk products and all instruments are capable in the right hands, which is not far from the truth.
We had Keyboards as well in Germany and I was a monthly subscriber up until 2006. They did add CD's with sound examples which was super handy. Ended up buying 2 of the editorialized synths: a CS1x and Microwave XTK - both which have not stayed in my setup but were totally living up to their expectations from reading their articles
hardcore throwback to being in highscool and reading these at my local Barnes and Noble and then jacking the DVDs so I could watch the masterclass videos haha, never really noticed the stuff about the ads because at the time I was more worried about seeing what other producers were doing and using
Great video, brought back a bunch of memories! I worked briefly at one of the magazines you mention back in the early 1990's. I was the ad salesman, and I'd gotten the job via my then-girlfriend-now-wife, who was the assistant editor at the time. There definitely was tension between selling ads and giving advertisers favorable editorial treatment, but I will say that the editor in chief at the time was probably the most ethical person I've ever worked with in all my years. He absolutely wouldn't tolerate "advertorial" content, and even if I sold the inner front cover page at the card (list price) rate, he wasn't going to say nice things about a piece of gear that he or his reviewers thought sucked. That's the main reason you'd rarely see reviews with less than 4 or 3.5 stars; if it was a bad review, we'd give the manufacturer a heads-up to see if we'd missed something, made a mistake, or if it was something they could address, but if not, we'd usually just not run the review. That was part of the tension: we didn't want to create ill will with a company that might advertise even if we chose not to cover their products.
I'd also say that while being able to watch and listen to a video is an obvious huge improvement over reading words about how awesome some audio gear is, RUclips reviewers haven't necessarily escaped the tensions with the companies that give them the products to review (and keep indefinitely for free) and the pressure to produce advertorial content. Among others, Venus Theory and Benn Jordan have been pretty candid about this.
All magazines were like that. My friend wrote for off road magazines and he was told never say anything bad about any of our advertisers during your reviews
You are correct in that the nose of most magazines was brown. The browner the better, because that's the only way they knew how to compete. In fact, I used the blatant "axx kissing" as a way to criticize the other magazines.
I see where you are coming from, but I think something else has changed that puts the role that the magazines played in a different light. During the 80’s through the early 00’s there were often pro level music stores that stocked and displayed MOST of the gear found in the magazines. These stores were often staffed with people who prided themselves on being knowledgeable about the gear and its capabilities. I think we saw the magazines as the first place to learn about what was available or coming soon, and then we had a place to go and put our hands on the actual equipment and listen with our own ears. I myself sold synths samplers and digital recording systems for several years and I took it very seriously. I always appreciated the store that sold me my first used synth (an Octave Cat) and later let me play around with the Juno 106 they kept on the floor (until I had saved enough to put down a deposit on it). So later, when I became a person selling synths and software, I tried to be genuinely helpful getting people what they needed to do the job. These days, I live in a very large city but even here the music stores seem to be stocking less and less pro gear and the people in the stores are rarely able to offer detailed information about it. Inevitable I guess as the business has just changed so much due to mail order and the internet. So maybe it was just me, but I never expected magazines to be unbiased, they listed out features and gave us a heads up about what was around the corner, but I think I saw them for the promotion driven publications they were and for me, the decision to buy was made from testing it out in the store or even renting one to play around with. Loved the video and I’m looking forward to exploring more of your content. 😀
This video is so wonderful! There’s the nostalgia alone, but also much more. I appreciate your perspective, research, presentation, and sense of humor.
The amount of times I'd walk into a barnes and noble, picked up a few music software magazines, sat quietly in a chair and read them while quietly slipping the cover CDs into my jacket pocket... Terribly sorry B&N but I appreciate the samples
@@noiretblancvie-afterhours Na,I stay on Sweetwater and ams and it's way worse! I am an addict...bought a new amp today...why?I have the Marshall bug in me!
I loved getting the CDs from Computer Music and Future music. They did video interviews with Bonobo and Four Tet before they got big. They had to record the DAW by putting the camera up to the screen lol.
Keyboard Mag! I liked Jim Aiken's reviews and articles the best. I always thought he was fair. I still see him occasionally in the Reason forum on Facebook...which is really cool. I salivated over those magazines. I wanted sooooo much and could afford so little. But I did learn a lot and they made buying a MIDIverb or a Roland JV-880 mean so much more because I FINALLY got to own a piece. It was an unhealthy obsession but it was a lot of fun and I mostly stayed out of debt. Paid for my Ensoniq EPS with cash and I felt the pain of every $20 bill leaving my hand. It took forever to save for that thing!
Awesome video! I was reading Keyboard, EM, and Sound on. Sound from the 80s to somewhere in the 2000s. Definitely transparently advertising-driven but I enjoyed them. Lots of good tutorial-type content even if there was an ad for the product next to it.
My friend still writes for Future Music has done for around 20 odd years, does the artist interviews and retrospectives. I never trusted their gear reviews and only used Sound on Sound for recommedations. I still have almost the the same setup for 25 years the only new piece of gear I own is a Polyend Tracker Mini and a cheap 24 channel mixer the rest is from the 90s/00s. Small simple and a good understanding of each item.
Dang dude you did the research calc on this, even if it was "only" one year. Indicative of the entire magazine industry honestly, subscriptions/purchases were a fraction of ad revenue so it's always a game of keeping them happy. Superb editing, including hitting us with the Dave Smith at the end. 😢🙏
The Dave Smith ad was really nostalgic, right... shows how he started all over again after the sequential days, couldn't even get real ads, he just posted DSI in the classified. R I P for sure Dave!
Keen observation. Revenue from subscriptions meant very little to the magazine's financial success. But having your name and address on our mailing list was the key. 99% of our revenue came from advertising. We were happy to give you the magazine free. Our subscription list was audited by various companies to verify the numbers, and that's what we presented to the advertisers.
Fantastic video, great points! I was also an Electronic Musician subscriber in the early 00s, and Recording magazine - I was young then, in middle school - high school (very impressionable). I've been so concerned with the inaccuracy of authoritatively-worded statements by self-proclaimed production and engineering experts online these days that I didn't even consider how the opinions and reviews that I was reading (from the so-called "professionals") in the era previous don't seem to have any superior credibility - as you point out, its almost as if we should assume that negative opinions would be omitted. Fascinating.
Good to have your videos back... nostalgia is always a two-edged sword. What I will say is: even today, many (most, a lot, more than you think) videos suffer from biases. But god bless Sound On Sound!
These magazines were nothing but glorified advertising platforms whose sole role was to persuade the world's bedroom musicians to keep buying more and more gear. The equipment companies kept the magazines in business with an endless stream of expensive full page adverts and kept the reviewers 'on side' by giving them an endless stream of free equipment to review. It was a plainly obvious scam to me at the time, but hundreds of thousands of would-be musicians around the world fell for it over and over again. Great video!
I can tell you that KEYBOARD during the 90's was a lifeline for those of us who had little money but wanted to keep up with things. The *technical* columns and articles were gold; so much so that I have a cache of scans from the articles I saved from that era. Still good advice on technique, arranging, and composing in there. Some of the in-depth analysis of tracks and albums is still paying off for me.
1985. I was assistant editor on Electronic Soundmaker magazine here in the UK. Once a month we spent a weekend in the home studio of one of our contributors and made what was effectively an hour long podcast, including clips of all the gear we reviewed in the magazine, and music from the bands we interviewed. This was put on an actual cassette tape sellotaped to the front of the magazine. It was a great idea, except the tapes dragged the mags off the shelves in the shops. Ah, the good old days! :)
Reminds me of how I loved reading gaming magazines in the early 00s. Because the medium was static - only text and low res screenshots, the writers had to be really creative with their writing, much more so than on an online article nowadays, let alone a RUclips video script 😢 those were magical times
Nice video! Wow, I didn't realize how much Ableton 1 looked like Ableton of today. And I was recently getting nostalgic for old mags too, but I'd kinda forgotten how ad-heavy they were.
As someone who didn't subscribe to these mags at the time and knew very little about audio equipment until much later, I've found myself reading reviews of vintage gear from the Sound on Sound online archive quite frequently. At least for that publication (during the 80's-mid 90's), there is fairly unfiltered criticism, regarding the deficiencies of a given piece of equipment- I wonder if this phenomenon of pandering to the advertisers was specific to certain publications and periods of time. By the 2000's, the internet was a thing, so maybe this was a phenomenon which occurred as a result of that. I definitely remember magazines including more ads, as the writing was beginning to show on the wall.
Not sure how I only just now found your channel… glad I did! I’m an old-school mag guy myself and had the Tascam 8 track tape recorder before digital even lol… still playing and still recording. But like you, it always amazed me that we NEVER saw a review that was “negative” and always ended with a low key sales pitch. The mags definitely was gatekeeping central, but yeah… we all knew it… and we paid for it monthly regardless lol … how can you beat 180 pages worth of gear you would never own? 😂. Great vid! 👍🏻👍🏻
I was just thinking about you and here you are releasing a new video! Very cool! Although I'm a big fan of magazines, I'm very aware they're all more or less just bundled advertisements. The occasional tutorial is great. Therefor I still like Computer Music Magazines the most. I also love how it comes with sample videos and tutorials and let's not forget the access to all their plugins.
I used to own almost every issue of EM, Keyboard, Electronic Music Maker, Music Technology, and Sound on Sound. These were both a cause and short term fix for my synth acquisition dreams! Interviews with synthesizer artists were especially good, and even when I didn't listen to their music, I was interested in their methodology and what they had to say. I mostly read all the reviews to see how many parameters I could tweak on machines I wouldn't be able to afford for another few years at least. I could only imagine the sounds! The thing that made me keep the mags for so long were the more technical articles, which were like a periodical update to my electronic music book library.
Keyboard definitely had some solid lick articles and good harmony tips... back then ads on ads were the norm, I guess I was just used to it as a kid, now that I'm older it was peak consumerism on paper...so it's a little weird, especially the ads that say things like "what's missing?" like...uhhh
This video was awesome, your presentation of the history in it was awesome, and I am now a new subscriber to your channel because of this video and its content!
I made this comment on Weaver Beats' reaction to this video, but I thought it might be welcome here as well. I used to work in magazines. When it comes to ad:editorial ratio, a free magazine generally will have a 50 : 50 split. Paid-for magazines with universal appeal (People, Time, etc) will usually be like 40 : 60, more specialized ones like these will be closer to the 50 : 50. The difference between magazines and digital is that with every page you publish, your costs go way up. You not only need to pay someone to create that content, but you have to actually pay for the paper it is on. The harsh fact is positivity just sells better. People want to know what they should buy more than what they shouldn't. The more ethical mags will just not cover something, rather than give a dishonest positive review. Not publishing a review at all pisses off an advertiser a lot less than publishing a hit piece. All of this adds up to there being very little incentive to publish something critical. But no, reviews aren't just ads, it's just that the reviews that get published need to fit into a certain box.
I think this is a little bit of a sensationalist take on something which is reasonably logical. Yes, there is a capitalist undertone to many magazines - but these mags may simply be selectively reviewing the best gear. It's not that they give everything high scores carte blanche, it's that they focused on the best stuff because there is no way they could review everything. I've heard people say in the past, "if you can't find a review in X music magazine, then it means it's rubbish!" - I think that holds true.
I just wanted you to know that I _really_ appreciated the _Soylent Green_ allusion. As someone old enough to have worn a Member's Only jacket, seeing scenes of the good old days definitely gave me an Edgar G. Robinson kind of feeling.
3:26 - yooooo that Radikal Technologies controller!! I drooled over that for like 6 years and finally got one (2007 I think). Ended up selling it a couple months later lol...but honestly it really was as cool as it looked; I just had no idea what I was doing and it was way over my head
Loving this channel. Very nicely produced. Another point in this discussion about these publications; the reason why only certain brands became iconic and are so expensive. Neuman, api, etc
I agree those magazines were nothing but pure advertising. I spent a-lot of time reading them as well growing up. It was fun reading the specs on things I knew I could never afford. I don't miss them thou with all the influence now we get more than our share of the actual performance of a product without big brother making sure that it is always a good review.
At 14.40 ! 😂😂 You say “but I was’nt there”. At this moment old folks like me who have lived a fully GASsed life ,burst into laughter , because we were there devouring each new edition of the magazine . Lusting after the unobtainable ,confronted our responsibilities which inevitably meant we just did’nt have the disposable income….until we did and got made redundant, often from technology related jobs. Human technical knowledge is so perishable and time limited. Inevitably many of us succumbed and satisfied the build up of GAS that these magazines fuelled .In my case when made redundant I splashed out on the kit in the heavily featured Music Store from the mags. I have no regrets[and still have the kit] , you just realise that’s the features of your particular Chunk of the time Continuum . Great RUclips content Noir ! Love your attitude.
What’s a trip, is that rewire support was only discontinued as of the release of live 11 in 2020. I was still using it back then as a virtual I/O for Renoise as an audio output channel option
Great to see something new from you Noir. I always tune into your channel when I see something come up. What you are saying about the old magazines is so true. Back in the days I used to get these magazines, look at the address where the nearest stores were, or if I was going to be in that area while gigging, and take a trip to the store and spend the afternoon trying out the gear and asking the store salesman on his opinion. I didn't know what I was doing so as I had just got my publishing signing money I bought a lot of things that I didn't need and some that I never used as I only used what I could understand. I just used a ( don't laugh) Yamaha DJX and Sony Playstation MTV Music Generator recording into a Fostex DMT8VL. I basically bought about £15,000 worth of equipment and only used £1500 worth, if that. The value dropped drastically on the secondhand market too so my getting my money back was impossible on resale at the time. Fortunately one of my projects did very well on vinyl so I did make back most of the money on my last vinyl project at the end of 2000 but to this day if I buy any of those magazines I take whatever they say in reviews with a pinch of salt and now with experience when I go to a store I play whatever I'm interested in for months before I actually buy it and by the time I bring it to my studioI I already know how to use it and am confident that it's worth it.
Also shoutout to scratch mag ! I think also back in the day the barrier was higher for companies too so they were unlikely to make half baked products.
I love pieces like this, keep it up. I read a ton of these mags and I think you are right, they were never negative. As far the ads go though these were like a trip to a music store that had tons of gear, I didn’t have a big music store near me so it was cool to see that ads too.
Thank you! Same here, anyone outside of really major areas or right next to Sweetwater never could access any of this stuff, I was a kid then, so I never could buy anything anyways, now as an adult it is sooooo weird to look back at magazines like this.
I vaguely recall an answer to a reader's letter in either Computer Music or Future Music where they said they didn't bother reviewing the crap stuff, as pages were limited, and a bad review wouldn't help you to find the great thing you didn't know you needed, just to avoid one thing that's a bit sup-par. They might also have said that the money being spent on R&D made it less likely that a big tech company is going to release a total turkey (but not impossible).
My 2 cents… I wrote a single gear review for EM and received no guidance other than a word count and the piece was not revised... so I also feel the premise is overstated. I relied on Keyboard, EM and SOS all the time for insights into gear buying decisions and appreciated reading the different opinions of the writers for each mag.
The title for your video is both accurate and appropriate. The payola game was bigger than you can imagine. Editorial integrity was an expense the owners took every chance to avoid. To even insinuate that trade magazines in the 80's and 90's were a form of journalism is delusional thinking.
Good video. These were the days of 48th st... NY's music row...A classic block of music stores... Manny's, Sam Ash... If you saw it in those magazines, you could actually see it (...and buy it...) in those great shops. Truly the good ol' days.
This takes me back, in old England i used to spend a small fortune on Sound on sound ,keyboard magazine. Electronics and music maker , Studio and recording world , and perhaps a few more, most British magazines had a cassette demo and later CD with the reviewed sound gear on ,for a listen, anyone remember Dave Bristow the Yamaha gear demonstrator ,happy days , when the Pro gear would cost your the price of nice car or a good deposit on a house :} the music revolution with computers was at a lightning speed ,in my life time gone from old Black and white TV to super wide screen monitors
I remember this era like it was yesterday... I had lots of these mags and recognize a lot of them here. The ads were exciting to see too though, only in these mags did you see any of this stuff unless you had a large music store you could go to.
Love this. Recently found a few old copies of Electronic Musician from the early 90’s at a local thrift store in my area and they’ve been fun/hilarious to thumb through
As a former Editor and Publisher, I agree with your general analysis. The US even had words to separate these magazines from the rest of the literary medium: "Trade Magazines." It was a blanket term that somehow exempted their content from responsible observation. And it was used to distinguish the writers of these magazines from qualifying as "journalists," when in fact the staff of these magazine companies consisted of graduates and ex-employees from the very best journalism schools and newspapers in America. In the 80's-90's, these "gear head" magazines became such "bragging pits" that they served to pull the public's attention away from the really significant changes that were taking place in the US.
I love being old and having the meories of how impacting these old mags were. Also DJ mags and general music mags too! Free tape on the front.... oh yeah, livin' the dream. 😁
I actually read a quote by a former tech journalist at some point, although I think that was somebody who wrote about computer gear, who said it straight out, that bad reviews means potentially losing those companies as advertisers, and thus, all reviews became more positive than they perhaps should have been. I wish I remember who said it, but I don't think it's very surprising. Printing full colour magazines is expensive, and without advertisers, it wouldn't really have been possible, at least not without charging a fortune.
Funny, this made me remember I've been keeping a few EM mags, and a Polyphony issue, all from the '80s. I've kept them because of articles like "The Feel Factor in Music" or actual circuit diagrams of something I wanted to make. But, yea, the gear adds were fun to dream about.
I remember these. Growing up in a small town I had no hope of getting my hands on any of the gear, I really just read to educate myself. Where else could a 16 year old learn about something as obscure as granular synthesis. They opened my eyes to a wider musical world. But it was all about advertising, I knew that. All the other music mags gave away sample CDs, why didn't electronic music production mags get on that bandwagon?
This was SPOT ON!! Great memories and indeed it was ads ads ads ads…. But to your point they were education, lol exactly correct you had to depend on descriptive adjectives to compare the sound of various products in your mind. I have hundreds of these magazines in my basement
i wrote for the animation/video industry years ago. I did a review of a product and well, there were several problems with the software, some of which were inexcusable. i got paid and they ended up not publishing it
Not only the audiophiles. Anyone involved in displaying a talent that depends on the use of an instrument of any kind -- electronic or acoustic -- is involved in this game of "credentials" and "endorsements." And now comes AI, where even the author and the instrument are hidden.
I used to have a subscription to Keyboard Magazine but unsubbed in the 90s when it stopped being a proper magazine and just became a pamphlet full of ads you had to pay for.
I bought those magazines for the ads as well as the articles. Now you read articles on a music website and the ads, which are more intrusive, have nothing to do with music gear. I’ve read bad reviews in Guitar Player magazine. I had Electronic Musician magazine all the way back to when it was called Polyphony. I still have the first issue of that from PAiA Electronics.
I’ve been reading guitar mags since the 80’s. I always thought it was a given that magazines wouldn’t review poor products as it made advertisers nervous. They just wouldn’t review bad gear, so if what you wanted wasn’t reviewed it was a red flag.
The reason certain products got reviewed and others didn't was more complicated. There were old grudges between advertisers and publishers that would sound childish in today's light. You also have to remember the time restrictions placed on publishers. Magazines, at least from the early 80's to the early 2,000's, were not yet computerized as they are now. I personally looped cables through our office ceiling to connect the parallel ports of our Commodore 64's to our typesetting equipment, and we were thrilled with this increase in efficiency. During my tenure, IBM PC's and Microsoft Publisher were not yet in sight, and by current standards were very expensive. Still, we had a two to three month gap between production and distribution, meaning the magazine we laid out in January would appear as March's issue.
Very interesting. I bought my first music mag ,"One..two..Testing" in the UK in 1982! I was 14 and read it from start to finish 100 times. You're probably right about it and bias and backhanders were common I'm sure.
I still have old keyboard magazines as far back as 1986! Those were the days -EM, future music, Mix ect.. Its SO easy now! Back then I felt so powerless sometimes looking at all the expensive gear ( And there was no internet, no youtube yet) But now any good DAW on a basic laptop is really all you need. Although GAS continues still! Haha
Damned I remember that Bart Simpson cover of Keyboard. Bought the AW4416 on specs and reviews. Somebody forgot to mention the learning curve. Steep as the Eiger North Face and forboding as well. Spend 6 K on it. Used it to record a few CDs. But I never liked it. It never clicked. But having said that the biggest problem were not the reviews (most gear back then was okay, so that was reflected in the reviews) but the lack of information back then. RUclips (hug) was in fact the gamechanger. It's not subject to gatekeeping, it's open to all, so now we indeed see and hear gear and even as gear is slashed (AudioPilz) it still gives it a vibe no magazine ever could. But the biggest benefit are the endless tutorials.
While you are basically correct, there is an interesting detail that influenced this ratio. In order to qualify for the significant discount magazines received from the US postal service, they were required to keep their ad-to-editorial ratio within specified parameters, which in actual practice turned out to be a poorly enforced stipulation. However, at 40%-ad to 60%-editorial, the magazine could still be profitable because different magazines charged different rates for their advertising space. At 50%-50% ratio, it was certainly profitable, or there was something wrong. At 60%-40%, it had better be profitable or the owners were likely bleeding the company, which was actually the goal all along. The income ratio between the owners and production staff was easily 9 to 1. The industry was flooded with journalism graduates coming from universities that were flooded with English majors, all a byproduct of the WaterGate scandal.
While this is true, what folks are missing is that we didn’t read magazine for the reviews. It was about the *announcements*. Where else could you go to learn of new cars or gadgets or gear? It was news for a specific topic that wasn’t covered anywhere else.
There was nothing better than to visit my local consumer news agency and finding my specially ordered copy of Computer Music Magazine had arrived, with its CD Rom full of crappy loops, questionable demo versions and even free soft synths and drum machines. Days of wonder...
I'm Just crying
Haha
Those were the days! ❤
Oh my, the cover CDs X))
'Well, it does need talent to create loops like that... Making them that unusable sure takes some time' :D
Loved that mag
EM was cool, but Future Music (UK) was where it was at, each month a CD of new samples and clips from the gear being reviewed in the mag.
Totally agree. Future Music was my gateway to synths & kit. They had great in depth interviews with artists, too. The CDs often had exclusive tracks from artists. Wish I still had all my old copies.
Agree, I think I got a free Felix Da Housecat CD on an issue on one of these, like I had to buy it, the CD was exclusively attached the that mag.
Early 2000's British magazines were miles ahead of US magazines, as far as value is concerned. The UK ones remained readable far longer than anything out of the USA. In addition, music mags out of the UK would have a lot more interesting music on a demo cd.
I still keep some of their free samples in my sample folders today lol, I cherished that CD on the months I picked it up!
Happy days of trying to get to the front of the crowd reading the latest mags in WH Smith.
Wonderful overview, and what a flashback to see so many of those ads! I’m 55 this year, and what you have raised is very much spot On!
"It's all ads" he says on a RUclips channel, on a platform that absolutely chokes me with ads. 😅
I guess in a way it's all relative, I've heard people complain about so many ads, but then I researched and was like back then it was all ads too! lol. It's all relative, somebody gonna get paid either way. You're definitely not wrong, it's just funny people think it was better back then (I did too) but it was still just overrun with advertising.
Sure, but the magazines had a clear conflict of interests reviewing products from the same companies that were buying ads.
@@RumchugMusic RUclips influencers have a similar conflict of interest, since they have to keep up a continuous flow of free review units from manufacturers. And RUclips pays them from ads that are often from the manufacturers of gear they review. Same wine, different bottle.
The ads were the best part of these magazines.... like the ads are better than some content now.
@@noiretblancvie-afterhours I grew up Soviet Union, where you literally had to look or wait for the adds to see them. On TV there was one 15 minutes advertising block at 8:45-9:00 PM and that's it, as example.
Cool vid. Nick Bat from Sonic State has said something to the effect of "if we don't feature a review of a new, popular product that means something". Presumably that the product isn't good enough to be positive about it. As Sonic State's gear reviews are generally very positive as well. I could imagine a similar mechanism being in place back then in printed magazines. Besides not wanting to bite the hand that fed them.
Yes, you hit the nail on the head. These mags just don't review crap - especially when we considering the cost of producing and distributing a physical magazine! I think it's hard to relate to that nowadays
I seem to remember them not reviewing the Korg Prologue when it came out because of this, even though it sounds great, at the time it was criticised for lack of modulation/aftertouch and mentioning these glaring shortcomings in a review might come across too negative. You have to remember that these companies are paid to sell instruments and they have very close relationships with the brands that they sell. Magazines and online publications are funded almost entirely off advertisements paid for by these brands. So it's in their best interest to look at the positives with nearly every product they sell, so they can sell more products and keep the manufacturers happy. At the end of the day they will justify it by saying that they don't sell junk products and all instruments are capable in the right hands, which is not far from the truth.
We had Keyboards as well in Germany and I was a monthly subscriber up until 2006. They did add CD's with sound examples which was super handy. Ended up buying 2 of the editorialized synths: a CS1x and Microwave XTK - both which have not stayed in my setup but were totally living up to their expectations from reading their articles
I can relate! I bought that Cs1x synth mainly because of the control knobs and the blue color. It had one electric piano patch that was Fire!
hardcore throwback to being in highscool and reading these at my local Barnes and Noble and then jacking the DVDs so I could watch the masterclass videos haha, never really noticed the stuff about the ads because at the time I was more worried about seeing what other producers were doing and using
Great video, brought back a bunch of memories!
I worked briefly at one of the magazines you mention back in the early 1990's. I was the ad salesman, and I'd gotten the job via my then-girlfriend-now-wife, who was the assistant editor at the time. There definitely was tension between selling ads and giving advertisers favorable editorial treatment, but I will say that the editor in chief at the time was probably the most ethical person I've ever worked with in all my years. He absolutely wouldn't tolerate "advertorial" content, and even if I sold the inner front cover page at the card (list price) rate, he wasn't going to say nice things about a piece of gear that he or his reviewers thought sucked. That's the main reason you'd rarely see reviews with less than 4 or 3.5 stars; if it was a bad review, we'd give the manufacturer a heads-up to see if we'd missed something, made a mistake, or if it was something they could address, but if not, we'd usually just not run the review. That was part of the tension: we didn't want to create ill will with a company that might advertise even if we chose not to cover their products.
I'd also say that while being able to watch and listen to a video is an obvious huge improvement over reading words about how awesome some audio gear is, RUclips reviewers haven't necessarily escaped the tensions with the companies that give them the products to review (and keep indefinitely for free) and the pressure to produce advertorial content. Among others, Venus Theory and Benn Jordan have been pretty candid about this.
All magazines were like that. My friend wrote for off road magazines and he was told never say anything bad about any of our advertisers during your reviews
You are correct in that the nose of most magazines was brown. The browner the better, because that's the only way they knew how to compete. In fact, I used the blatant "axx kissing" as a way to criticize the other magazines.
I see where you are coming from, but I think something else has changed that puts the role that the magazines played in a different light. During the 80’s through the early 00’s there were often pro level music stores that stocked and displayed MOST of the gear found in the magazines. These stores were often staffed with people who prided themselves on being knowledgeable about the gear and its capabilities. I think we saw the magazines as the first place to learn about what was available or coming soon, and then we had a place to go and put our hands on the actual equipment and listen with our own ears. I myself sold synths samplers and digital recording systems for several years and I took it very seriously. I always appreciated the store that sold me my first used synth (an Octave Cat) and later let me play around with the Juno 106 they kept on the floor (until I had saved enough to put down a deposit on it). So later, when I became a person selling synths and software, I tried to be genuinely helpful getting people what they needed to do the job. These days, I live in a very large city but even here the music stores seem to be stocking less and less pro gear and the people in the stores are rarely able to offer detailed information about it. Inevitable I guess as the business has just changed so much due to mail order and the internet. So maybe it was just me, but I never expected magazines to be unbiased, they listed out features and gave us a heads up about what was around the corner, but I think I saw them for the promotion driven publications they were and for me, the decision to buy was made from testing it out in the store or even renting one to play around with. Loved the video and I’m looking forward to exploring more of your content. 😀
Nostalgia overload just in the first four seconds!
Mackie Baby Hui
Lexicon MPX 550
*KRK Monitors
Access Virus C
Terratec EWS MIC8
Akai DPS24
Waldorf D-Coder
TC Helicon VoiceOne
Mackie Control
*Korg Triton Studio
Yamaha S80
Korg Karma
*Yamaha AW16G
*Rode NT4
Good old KRKs!
The Zoom ad at 2:08 is perfectly correct - I've used a Zoom 1608 for years and it has always worked perfectly. No PCs in my studio!
This video is so wonderful! There’s the nostalgia alone, but also much more. I appreciate your perspective, research, presentation, and sense of humor.
Thank you! It was personal for me, I enjoyed just doing the research!
I used to get Futuremusic, computer music, Dj mag and (sometimes) mix mag. All of them came with free cds or cd roms. Those were the days!
The amount of times I'd walk into a barnes and noble, picked up a few music software magazines, sat quietly in a chair and read them while quietly slipping the cover CDs into my jacket pocket...
Terribly sorry B&N but I appreciate the samples
Those ads gave you dreams of excitement,those ads were worthy of 79 pages to seek out new wonders...the guitar mags were the same....drool,drool!
I mean, back then I definitely didn't mind the ads, but reflecting now, it all seems dystopian lol
@@noiretblancvie-afterhours Na,I stay on Sweetwater and ams and it's way worse!
I am an addict...bought a new amp today...why?I have the Marshall bug in me!
Especially the American magazines Keyboard and Guitar Player.
That Cubase SX ad ❤️❤️❤️ excellent video and speaks volumes on how lucky we are to have RUclips and creators to do all this hard work for us 🤘🏼
Wow, thank you Dom! This was more fun for me than most people know! Musicians like us don't make lazy vids that's for sure ;)
I loved getting the CDs from Computer Music and Future music. They did video interviews with Bonobo and Four Tet before they got big. They had to record the DAW by putting the camera up to the screen lol.
I had those too, same with the hybrid making a track cd rom 😂
Keyboard Mag! I liked Jim Aiken's reviews and articles the best. I always thought he was fair. I still see him occasionally in the Reason forum on Facebook...which is really cool. I salivated over those magazines. I wanted sooooo much and could afford so little. But I did learn a lot and they made buying a MIDIverb or a Roland JV-880 mean so much more because I FINALLY got to own a piece. It was an unhealthy obsession but it was a lot of fun and I mostly stayed out of debt. Paid for my Ensoniq EPS with cash and I felt the pain of every $20 bill leaving my hand. It took forever to save for that thing!
Yeah, Keyboard for me was the most educational for sure.
Awesome video! I was reading Keyboard, EM, and Sound on. Sound from the 80s to somewhere in the 2000s. Definitely transparently advertising-driven but I enjoyed them. Lots of good tutorial-type content even if there was an ad for the product next to it.
My friend still writes for Future Music has done for around 20 odd years, does the artist interviews and retrospectives. I never trusted their gear reviews and only used Sound on Sound for recommedations. I still have almost the the same setup for 25 years the only new piece of gear I own is a Polyend Tracker Mini and a cheap 24 channel mixer the rest is from the 90s/00s. Small simple and a good understanding of each item.
I’m still buying mags today. There something special about getting the physical mag I hope they don’t disppear completely.
Dang dude you did the research calc on this, even if it was "only" one year. Indicative of the entire magazine industry honestly, subscriptions/purchases were a fraction of ad revenue so it's always a game of keeping them happy. Superb editing, including hitting us with the Dave Smith at the end. 😢🙏
The Dave Smith ad was really nostalgic, right... shows how he started all over again after the sequential days, couldn't even get real ads, he just posted DSI in the classified. R I P for sure Dave!
Keen observation. Revenue from subscriptions meant very little to the magazine's financial success. But having your name and address on our mailing list was the key. 99% of our revenue came from advertising. We were happy to give you the magazine free. Our subscription list was audited by various companies to verify the numbers, and that's what we presented to the advertisers.
When the world was simple and you received a CD rom full of free stuff with each issue. 😊
This was my life! Thank you for doing this!
Fantastic video, great points! I was also an Electronic Musician subscriber in the early 00s, and Recording magazine - I was young then, in middle school - high school (very impressionable). I've been so concerned with the inaccuracy of authoritatively-worded statements by self-proclaimed production and engineering experts online these days that I didn't even consider how the opinions and reviews that I was reading (from the so-called "professionals") in the era previous don't seem to have any superior credibility - as you point out, its almost as if we should assume that negative opinions would be omitted. Fascinating.
That centerfold though... nice knobs @@
Centerfolds in gear mags hit different lol
Music magazines where the best porn of that time.😛😛
Funny enough, when my daughter comes around and catches me doing synth stuff, we call it "old man porn"
Good to have your videos back... nostalgia is always a two-edged sword. What I will say is: even today, many (most, a lot, more than you think) videos suffer from biases. But god bless Sound On Sound!
These magazines were nothing but glorified advertising platforms whose sole role was to persuade the world's bedroom musicians to keep buying more and more gear. The equipment companies kept the magazines in business with an endless stream of expensive full page adverts and kept the reviewers 'on side' by giving them an endless stream of free equipment to review. It was a plainly obvious scam to me at the time, but hundreds of thousands of would-be musicians around the world fell for it over and over again. Great video!
I can tell you that KEYBOARD during the 90's was a lifeline for those of us who had little money but wanted to keep up with things. The *technical* columns and articles were gold; so much so that I have a cache of scans from the articles I saved from that era. Still good advice on technique, arranging, and composing in there. Some of the in-depth analysis of tracks and albums is still paying off for me.
1985. I was assistant editor on Electronic Soundmaker magazine here in the UK. Once a month we spent a weekend in the home studio of one of our contributors and made what was effectively an hour long podcast, including clips of all the gear we reviewed in the magazine, and music from the bands we interviewed. This was put on an actual cassette tape sellotaped to the front of the magazine. It was a great idea, except the tapes dragged the mags off the shelves in the shops. Ah, the good old days! :)
Great video! Always happy to see new stuff from you
So happy this landed in my feed, thank you!
Reminds me of how I loved reading gaming magazines in the early 00s. Because the medium was static - only text and low res screenshots, the writers had to be really creative with their writing, much more so than on an online article nowadays, let alone a RUclips video script 😢 those were magical times
i have read computer music and future music for 20 years and i have never seen them give less then a 7 for any reviews
Nice video! Wow, I didn't realize how much Ableton 1 looked like Ableton of today. And I was recently getting nostalgic for old mags too, but I'd kinda forgotten how ad-heavy they were.
As someone who didn't subscribe to these mags at the time and knew very little about audio equipment until much later, I've found myself reading reviews of vintage gear from the Sound on Sound online archive quite frequently. At least for that publication (during the 80's-mid 90's), there is fairly unfiltered criticism, regarding the deficiencies of a given piece of equipment- I wonder if this phenomenon of pandering to the advertisers was specific to certain publications and periods of time. By the 2000's, the internet was a thing, so maybe this was a phenomenon which occurred as a result of that. I definitely remember magazines including more ads, as the writing was beginning to show on the wall.
Great video - the nostalgia makes me wish I could go back and time and start the music journey over again with what I know now.
Not sure how I only just now found your channel… glad I did! I’m an old-school mag guy myself and had the Tascam 8 track tape recorder before digital even lol… still playing and still recording. But like you, it always amazed me that we NEVER saw a review that was “negative” and always ended with a low key sales pitch. The mags definitely was gatekeeping central, but yeah… we all knew it… and we paid for it monthly regardless lol … how can you beat 180 pages worth of gear you would never own? 😂. Great vid! 👍🏻👍🏻
I was just thinking about you and here you are releasing a new video! Very cool! Although I'm a big fan of magazines, I'm very aware they're all more or less just bundled advertisements. The occasional tutorial is great. Therefor I still like Computer Music Magazines the most. I also love how it comes with sample videos and tutorials and let's not forget the access to all their plugins.
I used to own almost every issue of EM, Keyboard, Electronic Music Maker, Music Technology, and Sound on Sound. These were both a cause and short term fix for my synth acquisition dreams! Interviews with synthesizer artists were especially good, and even when I didn't listen to their music, I was interested in their methodology and what they had to say.
I mostly read all the reviews to see how many parameters I could tweak on machines I wouldn't be able to afford for another few years at least. I could only imagine the sounds! The thing that made me keep the mags for so long were the more technical articles, which were like a periodical update to my electronic music book library.
Keyboard definitely had some solid lick articles and good harmony tips... back then ads on ads were the norm, I guess I was just used to it as a kid, now that I'm older it was peak consumerism on paper...so it's a little weird, especially the ads that say things like "what's missing?" like...uhhh
This video was awesome, your presentation of the history in it was awesome, and I am now a new subscriber to your channel because of this video and its content!
I made this comment on Weaver Beats' reaction to this video, but I thought it might be welcome here as well.
I used to work in magazines. When it comes to ad:editorial ratio, a free magazine generally will have a 50 : 50 split. Paid-for magazines with universal appeal (People, Time, etc) will usually be like 40 : 60, more specialized ones like these will be closer to the 50 : 50.
The difference between magazines and digital is that with every page you publish, your costs go way up. You not only need to pay someone to create that content, but you have to actually pay for the paper it is on. The harsh fact is positivity just sells better. People want to know what they should buy more than what they shouldn't. The more ethical mags will just not cover something, rather than give a dishonest positive review. Not publishing a review at all pisses off an advertiser a lot less than publishing a hit piece.
All of this adds up to there being very little incentive to publish something critical. But no, reviews aren't just ads, it's just that the reviews that get published need to fit into a certain box.
Great piece. I still flip through my old copies of Music Tech once in a while.
I’d love to read that review of Sonic Foundry’s Acid as that’s the DAW I learned on. How cool.
All good points made in the video!
Thank you!
What a fantastic video mate 🤩👍 retro mags, I’m so glad they exist. I guess in 20 years it’ll be retro RUclips 😂
Great content as always fam!!!
Thank you bro! These take forever lol
I think this is a little bit of a sensationalist take on something which is reasonably logical.
Yes, there is a capitalist undertone to many magazines - but these mags may simply be selectively reviewing the best gear. It's not that they give everything high scores carte blanche, it's that they focused on the best stuff because there is no way they could review everything.
I've heard people say in the past, "if you can't find a review in X music magazine, then it means it's rubbish!" - I think that holds true.
I just wanted you to know that I _really_ appreciated the _Soylent Green_ allusion. As someone old enough to have worn a Member's Only jacket, seeing scenes of the good old days definitely gave me an Edgar G. Robinson kind of feeling.
3:26 - yooooo that Radikal Technologies controller!! I drooled over that for like 6 years and finally got one (2007 I think). Ended up selling it a couple months later lol...but honestly it really was as cool as it looked; I just had no idea what I was doing and it was way over my head
Loving this channel. Very nicely produced.
Another point in this discussion about these publications; the reason why only certain brands became iconic and are so expensive. Neuman, api, etc
I agree those magazines were nothing but pure advertising. I spent a-lot of time reading them as well growing up. It was fun reading the specs on things I knew I could never afford. I don't miss them thou with all the influence now we get more than our share of the actual performance of a product without big brother making sure that it is always a good review.
At 14.40 ! 😂😂 You say “but I was’nt there”. At this moment old folks like me who have lived a fully GASsed life ,burst into laughter , because we were there devouring each new edition of the magazine . Lusting after the unobtainable ,confronted our responsibilities which inevitably meant we just did’nt have the disposable income….until we did and got made redundant, often from technology related jobs. Human technical knowledge is so perishable and time limited. Inevitably many of us succumbed and satisfied the build up of GAS that these magazines fuelled .In my case when made redundant I splashed out on the kit in the heavily featured Music Store from the mags.
I have no regrets[and still have the kit] , you just realise that’s the features of your particular Chunk of the time Continuum .
Great RUclips content Noir ! Love your attitude.
Apologies My Bad , comment was not at 14.40. Somewhere else.?
At 5.57 “obviously as I wasn’t there ,I could not say for certain” 😂😂. That s the correct time stamp and quote. Thanks.
What’s a trip, is that rewire support was only discontinued as of the release of live 11 in 2020. I was still using it back then as a virtual I/O for Renoise as an audio output channel option
Great to see something new from you Noir. I always tune into your channel when I see something come up.
What you are saying about the old magazines is so true. Back in the days I used to get these magazines, look at the address where the nearest stores were, or if I was going to be in that area while gigging, and take a trip to the store and spend the afternoon trying out the gear and asking the store salesman on his opinion. I didn't know what I was doing so as I had just got my publishing signing money I bought a lot of things that I didn't need and some that I never used as I only used what I could understand. I just used a ( don't laugh) Yamaha DJX and Sony Playstation MTV Music Generator recording into a Fostex DMT8VL. I basically bought about £15,000 worth of equipment and only used £1500 worth, if that. The value dropped drastically on the secondhand market too so my getting my money back was impossible on resale at the time.
Fortunately one of my projects did very well on vinyl so I did make back most of the money on my last vinyl project at the end of 2000 but to this day if I buy any of those magazines I take whatever they say in reviews with a pinch of salt and now with experience when I go to a store I play whatever I'm interested in for months before I actually buy it and by the time I bring it to my studioI I already know how to use it and am confident that it's worth it.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
At my local Books a Million, there are tons of music magazines, including Computer Music, Future Music, Guitar World, and many more.
Keyboard magazine had the flexi disk I remember being blown away with the Kawai K5 demo 🥹
Loving this video...and I'm not even done with it!
Also shoutout to scratch mag ! I think also back in the day the barrier was higher for companies too so they were unlikely to make half baked products.
I love pieces like this, keep it up. I read a ton of these mags and I think you are right, they were never negative. As far the ads go though these were like a trip to a music store that had tons of gear, I didn’t have a big music store near me so it was cool to see that ads too.
Thank you! Same here, anyone outside of really major areas or right next to Sweetwater never could access any of this stuff, I was a kid then, so I never could buy anything anyways, now as an adult it is sooooo weird to look back at magazines like this.
I vaguely recall an answer to a reader's letter in either Computer Music or Future Music where they said they didn't bother reviewing the crap stuff, as pages were limited, and a bad review wouldn't help you to find the great thing you didn't know you needed, just to avoid one thing that's a bit sup-par. They might also have said that the money being spent on R&D made it less likely that a big tech company is going to release a total turkey (but not impossible).
PS- Great vid. Amazingly original ideas as ever. Love the channel. Keep it uuuuuup !
My 2 cents… I wrote a single gear review for EM and received no guidance other than a word count and the piece was not revised... so I also feel the premise is overstated. I relied on Keyboard, EM and SOS all the time for insights into gear buying decisions and appreciated reading the different opinions of the writers for each mag.
....and speaking of nostalgia, I miss the days when you used to wear sunglasses in a darkened room 😎😂
The title for your video is both accurate and appropriate. The payola game was bigger than you can imagine. Editorial integrity was an expense the owners took every chance to avoid. To even insinuate that trade magazines in the 80's and 90's were a form of journalism is delusional thinking.
Good video. These were the days of 48th st... NY's music row...A classic block of music stores... Manny's, Sam Ash... If you saw it in those magazines, you could actually see it (...and buy it...) in those great shops. Truly the good ol' days.
This takes me back, in old England i used to spend a small fortune on Sound on sound ,keyboard magazine. Electronics and music maker , Studio and recording world , and perhaps a few more, most British magazines had a cassette demo and later CD with the reviewed sound gear on ,for a listen, anyone remember Dave Bristow the Yamaha gear demonstrator ,happy days , when the Pro gear would cost your the price of nice car or a good deposit on a house :} the music revolution with computers was at a lightning speed ,in my life time gone from old Black and white TV to super wide screen monitors
6:53 Chank Diesel font! I forget the name!
I remember this era like it was yesterday... I had lots of these mags and recognize a lot of them here. The ads were exciting to see too though, only in these mags did you see any of this stuff unless you had a large music store you could go to.
Love this. Recently found a few old copies of Electronic Musician from the early 90’s at a local thrift store in my area and they’ve been fun/hilarious to thumb through
Magazines are a collection of advertisements that are accompanied by some interesting words and pictures.
As a former Editor and Publisher, I agree with your general analysis. The US even had words to separate these magazines from the rest of the literary medium: "Trade Magazines." It was a blanket term that somehow exempted their content from responsible observation. And it was used to distinguish the writers of these magazines from qualifying as "journalists," when in fact the staff of these magazine companies consisted of graduates and ex-employees from the very best journalism schools and newspapers in America. In the 80's-90's, these "gear head" magazines became such "bragging pits" that they served to pull the public's attention away from the really significant changes that were taking place in the US.
@@trumpet59 It's a shame. It's one of the many ways that capitalism has ruined socialism.
I love being old and having the meories of how impacting these old mags were. Also DJ mags and general music mags too! Free tape on the front.... oh yeah, livin' the dream. 😁
I actually read a quote by a former tech journalist at some point, although I think that was somebody who wrote about computer gear, who said it straight out, that bad reviews means potentially losing those companies as advertisers, and thus, all reviews became more positive than they perhaps should have been. I wish I remember who said it, but I don't think it's very surprising. Printing full colour magazines is expensive, and without advertisers, it wouldn't really have been possible, at least not without charging a fortune.
Funny, this made me remember I've been keeping a few EM mags, and a Polyphony issue, all from the '80s. I've kept them because of articles like "The Feel Factor in Music" or actual circuit diagrams of something I wanted to make. But, yea, the gear adds were fun to dream about.
This was a great video to watch. And very well put together and documented.
I remember these. Growing up in a small town I had no hope of getting my hands on any of the gear, I really just read to educate myself. Where else could a 16 year old learn about something as obscure as granular synthesis. They opened my eyes to a wider musical world. But it was all about advertising, I knew that. All the other music mags gave away sample CDs, why didn't electronic music production mags get on that bandwagon?
Yeah, some magazines had artist exclusive CD releases on some, I 100% remember that era!
I enjoyed listening to it. Well done. Great flow.
Always good to see content by you, man!
Appreciate it!
Sound on sound was and is the best.
the adverts only served as a visible benchmark of what was around. all musicians knew, and still know, there are only 12 notes.
Fantastic trip down memory lane and an interesting question asked 🙂
This was SPOT ON!! Great memories and indeed it was ads ads ads ads…. But to your point they were education, lol exactly correct you had to depend on descriptive adjectives to compare the sound of various products in your mind. I have hundreds of these magazines in my basement
Really great video! I was hooked the whole way. Hope everything is cool in your world :D
Sound on sound seem to always list pros and cons
SOS is king!
@@noiretblancvie-afterhours Indeed. This was a nostalgic video to watch. Alway love SOS and Future Music
i wrote for the animation/video industry years ago. I did a review of a product and well, there were several problems with the software, some of which were inexcusable. i got paid and they ended up not publishing it
This is like a one episode synth version of early cartoonist kayfabe, where they went back through old Wizard magazines.
4:20 audiophiles still put up with this when looking for iems and the like
Not only the audiophiles. Anyone involved in displaying a talent that depends on the use of an instrument of any kind -- electronic or acoustic -- is involved in this game of "credentials" and "endorsements." And now comes AI, where even the author and the instrument are hidden.
Awesome video man really enjoyed it. Magazines are crazy ad books you’re right.
Yo! Much appreciated, I love your energy sir! I watch your channel on the low just so you know 👀
@@noiretblancvie-afterhours appreciate it brother. Feeling it mutual. 🥷
I used to have a subscription to Keyboard Magazine but unsubbed in the 90s when it stopped being a proper magazine and just became a pamphlet full of ads you had to pay for.
I'd still like to use those Mackie MDR/HDR recorders tbh
I bought those magazines for the ads as well as the articles.
Now you read articles on a music website and the ads, which are more intrusive, have nothing to do with music gear.
I’ve read bad reviews in Guitar Player magazine.
I had Electronic Musician magazine all the way back to when it was called Polyphony. I still have the first issue of that from PAiA Electronics.
I’ve been reading guitar mags since the 80’s. I always thought it was a given that magazines wouldn’t review poor products as it made advertisers nervous. They just wouldn’t review bad gear, so if what you wanted wasn’t reviewed it was a red flag.
The reason certain products got reviewed and others didn't was more complicated. There were old grudges between advertisers and publishers that would sound childish in today's light. You also have to remember the time restrictions placed on publishers. Magazines, at least from the early 80's to the early 2,000's, were not yet computerized as they are now. I personally looped cables through our office ceiling to connect the parallel ports of our Commodore 64's to our typesetting equipment, and we were thrilled with this increase in efficiency.
During my tenure, IBM PC's and Microsoft Publisher were not yet in sight, and by current standards were very expensive. Still, we had a two to three month gap between production and distribution, meaning the magazine we laid out in January would appear as March's issue.
Very interesting. I bought my first music mag ,"One..two..Testing" in the UK in 1982! I was 14 and read it from start to finish 100 times. You're probably right about it and bias and backhanders were common I'm sure.
I still have old keyboard magazines as far back as 1986! Those were the days -EM, future music, Mix ect.. Its SO easy now! Back then I felt so powerless sometimes looking at all the expensive gear ( And there was no internet, no youtube yet) But now any good DAW on a basic laptop is really all you need. Although GAS continues still! Haha
Damned I remember that Bart Simpson cover of Keyboard. Bought the AW4416 on specs and reviews. Somebody forgot to mention the learning curve. Steep as the Eiger North Face and forboding as well. Spend 6 K on it. Used it to record a few CDs. But I never liked it. It never clicked. But having said that the biggest problem were not the reviews (most gear back then was okay, so that was reflected in the reviews) but the lack of information back then. RUclips (hug) was in fact the gamechanger. It's not subject to gatekeeping, it's open to all, so now we indeed see and hear gear and even as gear is slashed (AudioPilz) it still gives it a vibe no magazine ever could. But the biggest benefit are the endless tutorials.
A 60/40 ads-to-editorial ratio is industry standard for magazines. I know it seems like a lot, but ads pay for everything in the mags!
While you are basically correct, there is an interesting detail that influenced this ratio. In order to qualify for the significant discount magazines received from the US postal service, they were required to keep their ad-to-editorial ratio within specified parameters, which in actual practice turned out to be a poorly enforced stipulation.
However, at 40%-ad to 60%-editorial, the magazine could still be profitable because different magazines charged different rates for their advertising space. At 50%-50% ratio, it was certainly profitable, or there was something wrong. At 60%-40%, it had better be profitable or the owners were likely bleeding the company, which was actually the goal all along. The income ratio between the owners and production staff was easily 9 to 1.
The industry was flooded with journalism graduates coming from universities that were flooded with English majors, all a byproduct of the WaterGate scandal.
While this is true, what folks are missing is that we didn’t read magazine for the reviews. It was about the *announcements*. Where else could you go to learn of new cars or gadgets or gear? It was news for a specific topic that wasn’t covered anywhere else.
Hat tip to the Oxygen8 (@8:32) , the only piece of gear in that magazine still functioning perfectly today.
So essentially music scene magazines were just the same as videogame magazines back in the day... 😅