The Ritual of Flipping Through Music Magazines

A music magazine arrived once a month and had to last until the next one. That constraint produced a completely different way of reading than anything available now.

You did not read it once. You read the interviews first, then the reviews, then the bits at the front you skipped, then the ads, then eventually the classifieds and the tour dates for cities you would never visit. Over four weeks a single issue got fully consumed, including parts that would not have survived thirty seconds of competition.

The reviews had consequences

This is the part that has genuinely disappeared. A review used to decide whether you heard something.

Buying a record was real money and you could not preview it. So you read a review, decided whether to trust the writer, and spent the money or did not. That gave critics enormous power and made the writing correspondingly serious. A well-argued paragraph could sell a few thousand copies of a record by a band nobody had heard of.

It also meant you developed a relationship with specific writers. You knew which ones were reliable for what, which one was always harsh, which one liked everything. Reading a review was partly reading the reviewer, and people had strong opinions about individual bylines.

Now you can hear the record in four seconds, for free, before reading anything. That is straightforwardly better and it removed the entire function. A review is now a thing you read after deciding, if at all.

The photography was the real product

Music magazines had access nobody else had and they spent it on portraits.

Proper sessions, shot on film, by photographers who had an hour with a band and knew what they were doing. Those images defined how bands looked for decades, and in a lot of cases they are more famous than any specific song. An enormous number of the visual references that retro design still draws on came out of magazine shoots rather than album covers.

Print helped. A full-page image on matte paper at that size has a physical presence that a screen does not replicate. And because there was no infinite feed, you looked at one photograph for a while rather than passing forty of them in a minute.

People cut them out. That is the strongest evidence of what those pages were worth. Somebody paid for a magazine and then destroyed it to get one image onto a wall, which is not a thing anybody has ever done with a webpage.

The ads were content

Nobody flipped past the ads in a music magazine, because the ads were how you found out things existed.

Instrument ads with specifications. Record label ads announcing releases you had no other way to hear about. Mail-order pages selling shirts, patches, and imports. Small ads at the back for equipment, bands looking for members, and things being sold by people in other cities.

That last section was a genuine social network operating at the speed of the postal service. You could find people through it. Bands formed out of a three-line classified ad. It worked slowly and badly and it worked.

Discovery had friction and the friction was useful

Finding out about a band from a magazine involved a delay. You read about them, decided you were interested, and then had to actually locate the record, which might take weeks and might not happen at all.

During that gap you built an idea of what they sounded like from the description, the photograph, and the name. By the time you heard the actual record you had been anticipating it for a month, and it either confirmed the idea or contradicted it, and both were interesting.

That gap is gone entirely and it is not coming back. Read about a band now and you are listening to them nine seconds later. The efficiency is enormous. The anticipation was doing something that nothing has replaced.

A monthly cycle sets a pace

Because it came once a month, there was a rhythm to it. You knew roughly when the next issue was due. You bought it at the same shop. There was a specific evening involved.

That rhythm gave music a place in the calendar. Things happened at a pace a person could follow. Now everything is continuous and nobody can keep up, which is not necessarily worse but is definitely different. Following music used to be achievable.

Where it connects to clothes

Almost every enduring musician look was established in a magazine photograph rather than on stage or in a video.

The reason is that a still photograph forces a single decision. One outfit, one pose, one image that will represent the person for years. Bands and photographers took that seriously, and the results were often more considered than anything the band wore in real life.

That is the same logic behind a good jacket. One piece that establishes a shape, chosen deliberately, worn consistently enough to become associated with you. The Newretro.Net range works from that idea rather than from having many options: leather and denim jackets, sunglasses with a real frame, watches with presence. A small number of things that read clearly.

What is worth missing

Not the information. Everything a music magazine contained is now available faster, cheaper, and in more detail.

What is worth missing is the editing. Somebody chose what went in and what did not, and that choice was made by a person with taste who could be argued with. Reading a magazine meant reading a point of view.

The feed has no point of view. It has a model of your behavior, which is a completely different thing, and considerably less fun to disagree with.