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for EMAP's Q
Hot Brit music could be swamped in U.S. bid
By Jeff Bercovici
How many music magazines does America need?
That's no idle question for Emap as it considers whether to launch an American version of the popular British music title Q.
FHM, Emap's sole U.S. publication, is said to have attained profitability despite a three-year head start by its chief rival, Dennis Publishing's Maxim. Having sold all its other titles to Primedia in 2001, Emap is anxious to test its luck again while giving FHM a sibling or two. It confirms that a U.S. edition of Q is one option.
But music magazines are a different matter from men's lifestyle books.
A U.S. edition of Q would face competition not just from Rolling Stone and Spin but also from Blender, Dennis’s two-year-old entry into the category, and from a new magazine to be launched this spring by former Spin editor Alan Light.
Given the circumstances, rival editors are understandably skeptical about whether Emap will risk bringing Q across the Atlantic and whether there’s enough unsatisfied consumer demand here to sustain it.
"I'd be surprised if they did it, to be honest," says Andy Pemberton, editor in chief of Blender. He knows Q well, having served as its editor before Dennis hired him to launch Blender.
Pemberton says Blender's editorial is inspired by the newsstand-oriented, consumer-driven approach of British magazines, including Q.
By increasing its rate base from 250,000 at launch to 410,000 now, Blender has demonstrated that there is a market for such an approach, which has also influenced Ed Needham's revamp of Rolling Stone.
"It could work, except there's a lot of music magazines around at the moment," Pemberton says.
To make room for itself, Q may well have to shove someone else out of the way. Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin and the men's magazine Gear, believes that someone else will in fact be Blender.
"Right now, Blender has been occupying that space intelligently, but this is the one thing that Emap does superbly," says Guccione. "They're going to win. Blender has the blueprint, but Q is a better-done magazine."
Clear-eyed business calculations aside, Guccione believes Emap will import Q if for no other reason than to punish Dennis for beating it in the men’s magazine race. FHM is the larger title in the U.K., but Maxim outsells it by a wide margin in the U.S.
"Emap is smarting over the fact that Maxim stole its thunder in the low-rent area of the men's market," says Guccione. "I believe this is payback."
Obviously Emap would have done well to have brought over Q two years ago, before Blender got its start. But Guccione he says the timing is still favorable.
"Right now, there's this very great sameness to the music business. Since nothing particularly matters, it's all of about equal interest. Britney Spears matters as much as Coldplay.
"A magazine that catalogs music so thoroughly as Q does, with its massive number of reviews and its sort of catholicness, is perfect for that time."
But not everyone believes Q is in for a smooth launch.
"It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have Blender – headed by a former Q-ster, and obviously deriving much inspiration from the magazine – and Q itself in the same marketplace," says former Spin editor Alan Light.
"I absolutely think it would need some serious shift in tone and coverage from what they can do for the much smaller, more concentrated U.K. readership and what they would have to do to reach a mass U.S. audience."
Light and another Spin alumnus, former group publisher John Rollins, hope to publish the first issue of their new music magazine sometime this spring. The magazine -- which has yet to choose a name but will not, contrary to earlier reports, be called Good Music -- will be aimed at a somewhat older audience.
January 7, 2003© 2002 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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