Paul Rees, Q Magazine editor, Sky News

Thursday, June 12, 2008

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'Q Mag Moves With The Multi Media Times', By James Silver

There are few better illustrations of the seismic changes in the media industry than the recent history of Q magazine.

Until a few years ago, the music Bible was simply a glossy monthly pitched at rock fans in fading festival T-shirts.

While its core audience probably remain better acquainted with Rogaine than the latest chart hits, today's Q is a fully-fledged multi-platform media brand reaching a wider audience than ever before.

The magazine aside, you can now watch (the very profitable) digital channel Q TV, download music and podcasts and view picture galleries on the Q website, QTheMusic.com.

The high profile Q Awards helps drive brand awareness, with spin-off publicity, as do other Q Events including the increasingly popular "Q The Music Club Live at The Hospital Club", where upcoming acts include Martha Wainwright and The Zutons.

And last week saw the launch of Q Radio, run by former Top of the Pops boss Ric Blaxill, which went on air on DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) in London, Freeview, satellite, cable, online and via FHM.com.

Overseeing Q's velvet revolution is editor Paul Rees, who looks like a leaner, younger version of John Lydon.

"The media has become so fragmented, with so much choice, that if you want to build your audience, and new revenue streams, you can no longer just be a monthly music magazine," he explains, sounding more management suit than music hack.

"If we were to stick to just being a traditional music magazine and nothing else, we'd just decline and decline."

A smaller publisher with lower overheads, he continues, might be able to make the old media business model work, but for a magazine like Q, which sits amid a raft of titles owned by Bauer Consumer Media, ignoring digital platforms was not an option.

"The big problem [for music titles] is that record company advertising is collapsing," he says.

"Record companies have less money to spend and there are now infinitely more opportunities for them to place advertising, particularly thanks to the Lemming-like rush online.

"So we had to broaden out our audience and our community.

"And the media [buying] agencies are now getting conditioned to the fact that one display ad [in the magazine] is no longer enough. Advertisers want to interact with Q in lots of different areas."

Rees, who's 40, says that the arrival of Q Radio "is the single most important thing we've done since we launched the magazine [21 years ago]" and takes issue with the suggestion that the listening public is already extremely well-served.

"We believe that commercial radio in particular is very formulaic," he says.

"The landscape is very regimented. There's not a great deal of real choice out there and we think Q Radio will provide a genuine alternative.

"The crucial thing is that people won't turn it on and think 'Oh it sounds like a magazine trying to do radio'. Actually it sounds like a proper, stand-alone radio station.

"And if we do it properly, our radio audience will be significantly bigger than our magazine's and a percentage of them will have absolutely no idea that we even do a magazine."

And yet despite the dizzying diversification, for the time being at least, the magazine remains by far the best-known part of the Q brand.

But while the title is still the top-seller in an overcrowded sector, with a circulation of 131,330, as recently as between July and December 2005 it was selling a monthly average of 168,547.

Rees acknowledges this. "And we'll be down again in June. But the music monthly sector is incredibly competitive and to be honest, over the past two or three years, most magazine and newspaper editors have managed decline to a greater or lesser extent."

So if its traditional magazine format is declining, does he think the magazine will even exist in "dead tree" form a decade from now?

"It will still exist," he replies. "But it may exist in a more luxurious form and its audience may be smaller and may be older.

"But overall, whether it be the magazine, radio, events, online, TV, the community of Q will exist in a bigger, wider way."

He adds: "And the trick is at some point turning [the digital platforms] into revenue."

A familiar headache for media executives the world over.

Posted by James Silver - On Thursday, June 12, 2008

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