7.12.2006

Thank God

I can stop worrying about cancelling my subscription from yet another music magazine, as Andy Pemberton's incompetent reign over Spin has ended its speedy, two-issue span.

Among the terrible ideas Andy and his team brought to the table: A porn star sex columnist; an Entertainment Weekly-style "Top 25 People Under 25 Issue" (wtf? I thought this was a music magazine); a completely vapid Editor's Note, a Q&A back page (also ripping off EW), and the hiring back of Ultragrrl and her pointless, page-hogging "101 top parties in the U.S." Seriously -- this thing wasted 20 pages of their last two issues. Don't worry, Spin -- we here in America can find the parties on our own. No one cares.

They also removed any attempt at legit music criticism and the "Spin 20" (one of the only things worth reading even in an otherwise bad issue). While my problems with Spin have been frequent in the past (My Chemical Romance appearing twice is 4 months comes to mind), nothing has been more worthless than these past few issues.

The future of the magazine is still a little shaky. How it's going to get out of this mess and turn into something I enjoy reading again seems like a pretty daunting task. Music mags in general are in a pretty sad state (which is unfortunate for a music fan like myself), so if anyone's interested in starting one up, let me know!

2 comments:

Kari said...

The magazine definitely needs some new life ... Maybe it needs more Ronsonville!

Anonymous said...

I had sort of vaguely noticed SPIN really sucking lately, but I didn't think about why. Clearly my life is lacking in media gossip.

Porn star column: bad
Party column: bad and who was the audience supposed to be? Anyone who lives in those cities and likes those scenes would know about them.

Etc.

And also: what's up with those near-the-back travel features? Who takes travel advice from Manhattanites anyway? And what happened to Dave Eggers' music columns?

At least they got rid of that guy who used to write embarrassing confessional columns on the back page a few years ago. yeesh.