Recording Magazine
On Sun, 26 Sep 2010 22:33:14 -0400, Mike Rivers wrote:
On 9/26/2010 11:48 AM, Ethan Winer wrote:
I agree, R-e/p was the best. I've thought many times about starting my
own audio magazine, and inviting knowledgeable writers like Mike Rivers
and Scott Dorsey etc to contribute. But I'm not sure how many people
actually want to learn about recording and the science of audio.
Around this time last year I was thrashing around the idea of an on-line
pro audio review web site with some background articles, and including
the parts of my reviews that I usually had to cut out - the parts that
were educatoinal so even if you weren't interested in a particular
product being reviewed, you could learn about the technology involved. I
figured that with essentially an unlimited article length, a review
could be really complete, informative, and educational as well.
I couldn't review everything myself, and I couldn't figure out how to
get enough income from it to pay other reviewers. There really isn't
money flowing magically over the Internet.
Then after writing a couple of reviews for Everything Audio Network (dot
com) I learned that people don't have the attention span to read more
than about a 1500 word article on line, or even at their comp8uter if
they could download the whole article.
Fine, so make the home page at the website about news and have it in
a more-or-less blog format, so people will return every day. That
blog would tell news of a new product, and say, "We'll be doing a
full review in the Month issue of the magazine." That would help
sell magazine subscriptions.
About 6 months after the magazine is published, put the full review
online at the website. This will attract more people to the site as
a result of search engine results, and show them how good the magazine
is. IMO, this seems to work very well for Sound on Sound, for example.
You can go in their archive and read complete issues of the magazine.
Also, you can put educational articles in the magazine, and gradually
add them to a learning center area of the website. That way, the
magazine can cover increasingly-advanced subjects, and new readers
can catch up by reading off the website.
The hardest part is getting things started. You either have to start
really small and informally, like Tape Op did, or have a lot of startup
money that you can afford to lose if things don't work out. But, if
you can get the money coming in, then you can continue to pay qualified
people to do the reviews.
I think the real difficulty is getting people to pay more than $10-15
for a subscription. If the readers don't pay for the costs, then the
advertisers wind up with too much power, the reviews become too positive,
and then people won't trust them and just search for other people's
comments on the Internet.
Jay Ts
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