"John Atkinson" wrote in
message om...
statistics. Here, then, are the paid circulation figures for
Stereophile
during the past 10 years. These are the figures submitted each
year by the
magazine's publisher with its second-class mailing statement to
the Post
Office, and are the average of the 12 issues preceding the
month of
filing (which is generally November):

1994: 71,040
1995: 79,332
1996: 85,808
1997: 87,219
1998: 83,921
1999: 85,224
2000: 91,384
2001: 84,987
2002: 82,932
2003: 81,668

Please note that there are many factors which contribute to a
magazine's
paid circulation, and that to draw any general conclusion
concerning any
specific factor will almost certainly be incorrect. For
example, if you
wish, as Mr. Boudreaux did, to correlate the magzine's
circulation with
the health of the high-end audio industry, our circulation in
2000, when
the industry was having a hard time, was higher than in 1996
and 1997
when the audio industry was at its peak. Regardless, I hope
that this
puts the matter of Stereophile's purported circulation problems
to rest.

That may be true but raw numbers can mask trends due to
population growth.

Raw circulation is down 10% from 2000 to 2003. However, a quick
trip to census.gov shows that's 15% per capita decrease over the
same time period. If we restrict population data to males
between the ages of 20 to 50 years then circulation is down
nearly 25% per capita.

I'm not drawing any conclusions about Stereophile in particular.
However, circulation has decreased to it's lowest absolute level
since 1995 and lowest per capital since 1994. Four continuous
years of decline in raw numbers and 5-6 years depending on
parsing of population data.

Maybe it's just the economy but it would be interesting to see HT
or S&V numbers during the same time period.