BigShinyThing

Evidently someone in The Guardian‘s art department has some classic vinyl at home: compare the cover for yesterday’s Guardian Weekend (above) with the sleeve art from hard rock band Mama Lion’s 1972 album Preserve Wildlife (below):

Points to The Guardian for revisiting the timeless theme of long-haired, slightly-disheveled blondes suckling cute baby animals, but our vote goes to the original shot of Mama Lion’s lead singer Lynn Carey and the kitty cat.

If you’ve never heard Mama Lion, hunt them down for some Joplin-esque, bluesy rock. Carey also turned in a storming vocal performance as the singing voice of character Kelly McNamara (played by actress Dolly Read) in Russ Meyer’s cult film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

[Thanks to Helen Noir for introducing us to the music of Lynn Carey and Mama Lion]

UPDATE: More album-art suckling identified by our readers. See the comments, below…

BST: What was/is the vision behind This Is A Magazine? Has it changed/evolved over time?

This is a magazine about nothing.

The production values of TIAM are extraordinary — what is the nature of the relationship between This Is A Magazine and its printers/paper suppliers?

The Compendia are published with the help of a paper sponsor (Sappi) and the long standing collaboration with the print-suppliers Nava Milano. We work very closely with Nava on the production of the books which in a way become the result of the conversion of industrial processes into ideas and back again. “Who I Think I Am” was awarded one of the print industry’s most prestigious honors, the Gold Ink Award for Best Hard-cover Book world-wide thanks to our partners Nava.

Does your publication generate business and leads for the artists involved?

Each artist relationship is unique, some publishing for the first time such as Atsushi Hasegawa or Boogie, others are already established such as David Shrigley or Antonio Riello. Each collaboration evolves into a world in itself, each with its own particular orbit.

Personally, between making our own artworks and producing the various editions Karen, Ann and I rarely become fully conscious of the notoriety the project brings. Sometimes we get invited to art fairs and openings, which is always nice. But ultimately I think business does not always know what to do with us.

Is there any brief to the artists involved or is it simply ‘whatever you want to do’/'go crazy’?

Although we don’t offer predetermined themes or briefs to artists, much of what you see published is the result of a dialogue and (sometimes) several exchanges of varying vivacity between ourselves and the artists.

The content of this Compendium seems less political than previous ones — was this a conscious decision?

The short answer is that each edition is a by-product of our experiences.

The long answer is that with “Who I think I am” we wanted to make a collection of psycho-dramas played out in determining the parameters of that social-contract called “identity”. The book begins by asking for the reader’s signature of agreement that he/she will be required to “complete” the book, and therefore the reader is implied as an explicit and necessary part in determining the artist’s individual works, and ultimately the book’s collective vision. The book ends with a bag of cutouts from all the Compendia to date that can be used to complete the final chapter, which is presented as empty pages of coloured craft-paper. This is a game of empowerment where the political structure of publishing, where the roles of passive-reader and dead-author are inverted.

Who are your target market?

We are not organized or systematic in our approach to marketing, in our very first issue we opened with a warning: “Marketing studies have shown that you probably will not like this magazine”. We work directly with some bookstores mainly because we like them and know the owners and people who shop there, otherwise we trust that we can connect with potential readers through whatever means available, for example word-of-web.

What is the intended reaction to the content (if there is one)?

We want everything to come up to the surface, like in an earthquake. Then the reader can sift through and find whatever is of interest/use, and (we hope) rebuild new meanings.

Where do you see This Is A Magazine going next?

The publication started as an online flipbook, with micro-animations, from there we moved to streaming QuickTime editions (which we called Peepshows), followed by a PowerPoint issue which was intended to be performed, an animated-gif issue and most recently we are exploring raw programming languages so that the issues can be generated in real-time viewing. During these years we have produced a full-length DVD and read-along giant-picture folio book, a bunch of other Compendia which took various forms, the most recent being “Who I think I am”. Where to next? We have 2 squeaky-new online issues ready to launch including the hidden “jonkers worst comic ever”, and we have started production on a new 2008 compendium called “Trust me, you will not be sorry”, all made from smoke and mirrors and other magic.

With thanks to Andy and Karen Donnachie and also Simon and David at Someone.

Launched five years ago by Gert Jonkers and Jop Van Bennekom, BUTT magazine sought to present a less shiny, muscle-bound aspect of gay male sexuality and has so far featured turns by fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm and Michael Stipe. Gus Van Sant, Marc Jacob and Casey Spooner are among the other luminaries who have been interviewed by the little pink low-fi mag. But it’s not just about famous people and mates of the contributors. BUTT has also featured a gay dustbin man, a gay farmer and a gay toilet cleaner just for good measure. And all with lovely (and occasionally pretty hardcore) pics by regular contributor (and Turner prize winner) Wolfgang Tillmans.

Jop, interviewed in this month’s i-D, says of the magazine’s inception:

The whole gay world was so closeted in a way. It felt boring to be homosexual. The subversive side was not being represented in the media, instead it was all about gay pride, all about being a consumer — you just felt like you were just a target for a new deodorant. There was hardly any representation of alternative gay culture at the time. We wanted to do interviews with people that were more real, with no shame. Get people to tell the truth — talk about their fears, or even just talk about something mundane. Hopefully BUTT can suggest that it is cool to be gay again.

Putting the Sex Back into Homosexuality: the Best of BUTT Magazine so far is published by Taschen.

BST cautionary note: BUTT’s content is not for the faint of heart and definitely NSFW — unless you work in Prowler.

To promote its More 4 drama Death of a President, Channel 4 used the wraparound on News International freesheet thelondonpaper.

Thousands of Londoners got an almighty shock as the ‘headline’ appeared to report the death of one George W Bush. What was particularly smart about this campaign is the photo is modelled on an already iconic image: the near-fatal shooting of Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Understandably, both the drama and its ad campaign have been rather controversial. And by working with an actual newspaper, More 4 have successfully blurred the lines between fact and fiction — a brilliantly provocative example of ‘what if?’

[Full disclosure: one of us works for United London, thelondonpaper's ad agency. We did not do the More 4 ad].

Picked up by the very intelligent ad-blog adpulp, the interview from DCist demonstrates how the balance of power has shifted from print to people online (emphasis ours):

Q. How do you feel about blogs compared with the mainstream music media?

A. When I got the “C” letter grade review in Spin, I heard nothing. Not from anybody. No one ever said anything to me. But whenever I got a good review from somewhere like Tiny Mix Tapes I would get emails about it. It was very clear to me then that all that print media shit doesn’t matter anymore. It totally does not matter. I mean, no offense to Spin or anyone like that, but people right now, hard core music people that pay attention, they’re online. The big national glossies just don’t have that kind of impact anymore. I guess. I mean this is all anecdotal, I can’t back any of it up, but the way people find out about us and find out things about us, it’s all bloggers. It’s all online ‘zines. Whether it’s Drowned in Sound or Tiny Mix Tapes or Largehearted Boy, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, the list goes on and on.

You know, it’s weird, if someone posts something on Metafilter, I look on my website and all of a sudden, we’re getting like 25,000 unique visitors in one day, you know. And we got a review on Pixel Revolt in Rolling Stone. And the day that that review came out, there was no bump whatsoever. And that was a good review. And we got no bump in traffic on the website. That’s insane. I can look at where people are coming from and who’s searching what, and what method they are using to get to my site. After that I was like, “Fuck paying a publicist to work your record, lets just email all the bloggers and send them a record or some MP3′s.”

A band will come up to me and tell me “Oh my god, we’re getting a record review in Rolling Stone and what I want to tell them is, ‘Listen, who cares, it doesn’t mean anything.’” What means something is that a blogger with credibility has his or her own fan base, you know what I mean? People follow bloggers because they understand their aesthetic framework and what they like and their sensibilities.

Read more about John Vanderslice and listen to his music on his site.

Arts collective Are You Generic declare sweetly ‘we miss content’ and invite readers to critique glossy mags by inserting the following diatribe between the ads:

The confessions of a generic magazine We loaded this issue with more advertising than content. The content we did publish was edited, censored and manipulated to please our advertisers or as lame filler between the product pushing ads. We got paid quite handsomely to produce this issue and are glad you will pay to read what we already got paid to print. Are You Generic?

Are You Generic? say that they are

A group of artists that seeks to protest, to question, and to disprove. Its nemeses are unethical corporations, censorship, the slanted media, hypocrisy, excessive advertising, and plain stupidity. Its heroes are art, discussion, independent thought, and creation.

We like. Via Wooster.

The perception courtesy of The Independent on Sunday:

The reality as seen in graffiti in the toilets of Barfly, Camden:

The Guardian reports today that News Corp’s British tabloid The Sun :

is planning to give its website a massive boost by tying it to the recently acquired and hugely popular MySpace.com community and networking site to create a “MySun” online readers’ network. The plan, in its early stages, would allow readers to go to a MySun portal and create their own web pages, blogs, as well as share pictures and video clips with friends using MySpace.com software.

In February MySpace overtook the BBC site in terms of visitor numbers and grew six-fold year on year, according to internet monitor Hitwise. It is thought that News Corp initially considered tying the site to its Times broadsheet but swiftly realised that MySpace’s 16-34 year old demographic might not be a good fit.

How Sun readers will get on with all of MySpace’s preening electroclash kids remains to be seen — could lead to some interesting colonies forming out there…

Buy this dress.
No, really. Buy this dress.

All images from the current issue of Dazed and Confused.

Albeit with the same layout…

No more crap joke corner. No more featured song lyrics. No more random questions like, “Do you have any friends called Tarquin?”. No more Pure Pop Fun (in print anyway) — not now that kids spend all their money on ringtones and voting in reality TV shows. We haven’t been this upset since they shut down The Face.

Update: Former Smash Hits editor David Hepworth adds his own obit in The Guardian this week. The lesson?

“In the new issue of Word, popjustice‘s Peter Robinson argues that “2006 could be the year when genuinely creative pop music muscles its way back into the mainstream.” Maybe the teen Smash Hits left the party just as it was about to get interesting. We shall never know. What we do know is that the liberal application of all the following failed to save one of the biggest brands in British media: money, market research, cover gifts, brand extensions, TV exposure, sponsorship, expensive redesigns, gondola ends, retail promotions, endless conferences and all the experience in the world.”

Talk about knowing your audience … The project launches in association with Vision TV and the headlines will be fed to plasma screens in more than 250 hairdressers across the UK, including the Redken chain in London. The service will be enabled by Vision TV by means of an RSS feed, which is already used to direct headlines from hellomagazine.com to computers. The headlines will appear on the screen alongside the website’s selected celebrity picture of the day.

Via Marketing Week.

MediaPost reports [via Gawker] that in the most recent ABCs for North America, The Economist saw a subscription increase of 14.2 percent over the first half of 2005, whilst fellow ‘serious-minded publication’ The Week saw its subscriptions climb 43 percent. According to The Week‘s president, Justin B Smith, “the traditional weeklies have become less news magazines and more popular culture magazines … But [these numbers] suggest that there is a growth market for serious, global minded journalism.”

We think that the success of The Economist and The Week has as much to do with fantastic editing. Way before blogs, rolling news and the plethora of sources that we now get our news from, both publications sought to inform on a ‘need to know’ basis, on a weekly basis. The Economist‘s advertising affirms this – think of the “I never read The Economist” – management trainee aged 42 poster. The Week meanwhile cleverly offers to edit all the week’s essential stories down to handy bite-sized pieces. Savvy papers like The Guardian have already started to follow The Week’s lead, offering The Wrap, an edited version the best of all the British newspaper coverage daily. And why bother to read a newspaper every day when you can look smart reading The Economistand/or The Week and then supplement your news via the web or TV?

One quibble though – why hasn’t The Week got any kind of readable and searchable online presence?

When the company’s annual results were announced last week, Murdoch stated his intention to spend as much as £1bn on internet acquisitions and that online is now a key part of the media empire’s future strategy. New Corp purchased myspace.com, one of the fastest growing online community sites, last month.

The purchase of Blinkx – which in true Dotcom style was founded by Suranga Chandratillake, a Cambridge computer science graduate – would provide search capacity for the Fox internet portal and could give News Corp the edge in what could be the Next Big Thing: search engines for finding films, TV episodes and news clips.

Murdoch warned a group of US newspaper editors back in April that the industry had been ‘remarkably complacent’ about the impact of internet use of newspaper circulation. He admitted that, ‘I didn’t do as much as I should have after the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same thing, quietly hoping this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along. Well it hasn’t, it won’t, and it’s a fast-developing reality that we should grab’.

It makes perfect sense for Blinkx to link up with Fox: it already uses video clips from the network. Murdoch, amongst other media commentators, has repeatedly stressed the potential of matching the volume of content produced by a media company such as his with the possibilities of distributing it via the net. Certainly, if the content owners don’t do it there are plenty of peer to peer services, such as Bittorrent, which will do it for them and not necessarily legally. Only yesterday, the BBC found that a Swedish site was distributing unseen episodes of Ricky Gervais’s Extras.

The deal also places News Corp at the vanguard of podcasting and video blogging - services that Blinkx can facilitate.

Founded in 1973, Kent University’s Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature, is a “research centre and picture library, based upon a unique archive of over 85,000 pieces of cartoon artwork supported by a reference library of newspaper cuttings, books, catalogues, and AV materials.” They fail to mention how much fun it is. Nor do they shout loudly enough about their online database of cartoon artwork, the contents of which range from the work of Hogarth to that of Steve Bell and beyond.

Recent political history is especially well-represented: since 1996, the Centre’s archivists have been dilligently clipping and scanning the daily papers into their system.

The collection doesn’t purchase art, growing rather via donation and bequest. This leaves some gaps, notably original works by James Gillray, whose influence looms large over modern British caricature. Nonetheless, a fine and lovingly-maintained resource.

Puzzler Media supplies Sudoku puzzles to groups such as News International, publisher of the Times and the Sun. The craze has proved such as hit that Puzzler’s majority shareholder, private equity fund ABN Amro Capital, has appointed Hawkpoint, the corporate finance house, to look at strategic options including a sale. Reports over the weekend suggested that the company could be worth as much as £100m.

Whether Sudoku – a paper-based craze in a shiny new world of technology – can save the newspaper industry may yet to be seen. Photograph of Sudoku-ers taken at my local pub.

The full story is available on the mediaguardian site. http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1544571,00.html (registration required).

The Wall Street Journal reports on how free covermounted CDs and DVDs are eating into music industry sales.
The Sun tabloid sells about 3.2 million copies a day – a figure which can be boosted by as much as 500,000 copies by including a free CD. According to The Guardian broadsheet, two of the five biggest-selling days for the paper were those with free CDs. The three other top-selling days were big news events: Tony Blair’s election as prime minister in 1997, the death of Princess Diana the same year and 9/11.

UK newspapers have used the strategy for years but the practice has become noticeably more pronounced recently as circulation continues to decline. It is extremely expensive: a CD can cost The Sun £600,000 for disc manufacturering, song rights and packaging. And then there’s the advertising costs. Marc Sands, marketing director of The Guardian, concedes

It is very expensive. But if you get the right sort of CD, people will stay with the paper.

It has also yet to stem circulation declines. The Sun‘s circulation has fallen 8% in the past five years, while sales of the Evening Standard, London’s daily paper, are down 21% during the same time, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation. Both papers had given away CDs during this period.

Instead music retailers are feeling the impact: sales of compilation CDs, the most popular type of newspaper giveaway, were 7% lower in the first quarter iof 2005 compared with the year before and are now at their lowest level since industry tracking began in 1998. In an average week, six million CDs and one million DVDs are included free with a newspaper. British retailers sell, on average, about four million CDs a week and five million DVDs.

Not surprisingly, the retailers are making moves to halt the trend. Last October, EMI Group Plc agreed to stop licensing songs to newspapers. Sony BMG has also stopped. According to Tony Wadsworth, chairman and chief exectutive of EMI:

We realised the newspapers were getting far more value from our music than we and our artists were.

British record company Sanctuary PLC has also decided not to license songs to newspapers after existing contracts expire this year. The company owns the rights to 150,000 songs and last year allowed the Observer newspaper to give away a CD of the Libertines — one of the most talked about acts at the time. It plans to limit newspaper licensing agreements to little-known acts. “We are only really looking for opportunities that enhance the profile of new, developing artists,” said John Reed, Sanctuary’s manager of special markets.

Oddly though, there is evidence that the promotions can actually help retailers. When the Mail on Sunday, with a circulation of 2.3 million, included a DVD of “The Fourth Protocol,” a 1987 spy thriller starring Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan, the Music Lovers shop in Norfolk, East England, didn’t bother to stock the DVD. “I thought there would be thousands out there and there would be no point trying to sell it,” said owner Roger Webster, although “someone came in and ordered it because their friend had got a free copy and it sparked their interest.”

According to the Financial Times, media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch are paying attention to the (rather gloomy) prediction of this short film. ‘Epic’ envisages a future in which online brands google and amazon will both create and own the media:

In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline.

The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned.

What happened to the news?

And what is EPIC?

Think this is far fetched? This week Google overtook Time Warner to become the world’s most valuable media company:

After its shares hit an all-time high on the New York markets on Tuesday, Google is now worth $80bn (£44bn). This takes it ahead of media leviathan Time Warner, which is valued at $78bn. The valuation comes in spite of the fact that Google’s annual sales total just $3.2bn, a fraction of Time Warner’s $42bn.

See the full story here.

The ‘Epic’ film is here.

Last month Vogue UK re-styled footballer’s fiancee Colleen McLoughlin. This month the magazine features Erin in a tracksuit with Vicky Pollard. Seems that ‘chav chic’ is fine for fashionistas as long as it’s filtered through the lense of high fashion.

Copy reads:

“Erin wears: printed jacket, to order, at Jean Charles de Castelbajac, Paris. Tank top with diamante trim, £20. Velour shorts, £20. Logo handbag, £17. All at River Island. Checked leather handbag, £425, at Burberry. Jogging bottoms, £35, at Puma. Visor, from £8. Wristbands, from £2 each. All at Nike. Shoes, from a selection, at Rokit. Necklaces, by D Squared, from a selection.”

Doesn’t mention Vicky’s outfit …

The smallprint reads

“Dear reader: our circulation director wants us to try what she’s calling a ‘grassroots marketing campaign.’ Here’s what you need to do. Make some photocopies of this page. Cut slits between the tabs at the bottom. Then, display or distribute the poster in places like corner stores, bathroom stalls, laundromats, beauty parlors, university libraries, stuffed in other magazines, bookstores, health clubs, supermarkets, community stores, phone booths, subway cars, windshields, lunch rooms, video arcades, and telephone poles.”

So go on then…