Bass Player Magazine RIP

[NancyJohnson]

1 hour ago, T-Bay said:

There has also always been the inherent conflict of interests where the very people doing the reviews may be reliant on the advertising income from that supplier. I am sure some maintain a distance but the reality is that a very poor product is not likely to be genuinely reviewed if the revenue stream from advertising could be adversely affected.

I'd often thought of this as being akin the the NME effect; (true or false) Danny Baker once cited the jingoistic Columbia Records A&R funding trips globally for the likes of Parsons and Burchill to report on Pink Floyd, when they must have known the copy would have been wholly negative.  Same goes the movie monthly Empire, being given full access to film sets, key actors and directors, then presenting an article running over several pages followed hot on the heels by a two-star review.

[petergales]

I've subscribed to both over many, many years now and still have outstanding subscriptions on both. Does anyone know if I can cancel one of them and claim a refund?

[skankdelvar]

31 minutes ago, petergales said:

I've subscribed to both over many, many years now and still have outstanding subscriptions on both. Does anyone know if I can cancel one of them and claim a refund?

BGM's website has the following number for subscriptions. They may be able to help you:

Subscriptions – 0344 848 2852

[Happy Jack]

On 30/09/2018 at 18:35, skankdelvar said:

Frankly they'd have been better off following the standard model of reviewing duff gear in such a way as to very visibly damn with faint praise: 'The tuners worked adequately in normal use but big bends revealed some instability ... an instrument clearly built down to a price ... slightly uninspiring pick-ups ... good for slide or a spare guitar in an emergency'. Those competent to read between the lines could recognise the difference between 'So good I went out and bought one' and 'Ho-hum' and everyone was happy.

 

I suspect he'll be unhappy with that ... oh, I think he's saying something to the referee ... and now there's some sort of disturbance amongst the fans ... they're all in the centre circle and there's a bit of pushing ... well this is something that nobody likes to see ... and as the Stukas dive in to bomb the last pockets of resistance ...

[toneknob]

I've received my first copy of the "new" BP (ie the USA version). Haven't read it yet but first impressions on a flick-through were (a) more text (b) more pics in reviews and (c) Steve Lawson is massively underused.

And of course where's my full song transcription boo hoo.

 

 

[petergales]

1 hour ago, skankdelvar said:

BGM's website has the following number for subscriptions. They may be able to help you:

Subscriptions – 0344 848 2852

Thank you sir! I'll give that a go.

[Happy Jack]

If that's the number of subscriptions, 3.44 billion seems rather large ...

[Steve Lawson]

On 06/11/2018 at 17:55, toneknob said:

and (c) Steve Lawson is massively underused.

Thank you! That's awfully kind of you, but I don't have enough hours in the day for everything as it is... maybe once my PhD is finished I'll have time for more journalism  I REALLY enjoy doing the beginner column for BGM - that Joel is not only fine with but encouraging of my desire to write a beginner column for intelligent adults (rather than one that assumes people with limited musical experience are also struggling in every other area of their education) is a real treat. It's telling, I guess that much of the feedback I get is from people who are technically way beyond the level of the column, but still find it conceptually and philosophically useful and worthwhile. 

I really did enjoy interviewing Stanley Clarke a few years back (my first artist interview for a mag in 15 years) but they're REALLY labour-intensive things to do, and just don't pay well enough to warrant the time it would take to do them regularly

...my back page pedals and effects column was, however, pretty much the most fun I've ever had writing for a mag (there's a compilation of those - with a couple of new articles - available to my subscribers on Bandcamp ) 

[toneknob]

1 hour ago, Steve Lawson said:

Thank you! That's awfully kind of you, but I don't have enough hours in the day for everything as it is... maybe once my PhD is finished I'll have time for more journalism  I REALLY enjoy doing the beginner column for BGM - that Joel is not only fine with but encouraging of my desire to write a beginner column for intelligent adults (rather than one that assumes people with limited musical experience are also struggling in every other area of their education) is a real treat. It's telling, I guess that much of the feedback I get is from people who are technically way beyond the level of the column, but still find it conceptually and philosophically useful and worthwhile. 

Having been a PhD student myself while also holding down 4 bands, I can sympathise!

I hope my comment didn't come across too priggish, but having seen you at gigs/clinics/etc over the years and on SBL geeking out on effects and hardware I was a bit surprised when your column was quarter notes on the open E string. But also as mentioned I've not actually read the mag yet, just had a quick flick through - I'm a few months behind. 

[Steve Lawson]

52 minutes ago, toneknob said:

Having been a PhD student myself while also holding down 4 bands, I can sympathise!

I hope my comment didn't come across too priggish, but having seen you at gigs/clinics/etc over the years and on SBL geeking out on effects and hardware I was a bit surprised when your column was quarter notes on the open E string. But also as mentioned I've not actually read the mag yet, just had a quick flick through - I'm a few months behind. 

not at all, I'm glad you'd like to read more from me  I've always enjoyed explaining things from the ground up - I've never understood those teachers who say 'advanced students only' - that seems like a recipe for having to deal with other people's terrible pedagogy  As the column progresses, it (at least from my perspective!) tackles a lot of things that are considered beginner concepts because of the physical requirements, but deals with them from a slightly more nuanced position than is often the case. For the new Bass Player re-launch, they've started my column back at the start again, whereas in BGM I'm about 2 years deep into it (they didn't want to suddenly drop into the series that far into it!) 

[visog]

Yes in its day, it was a beacon no doubt. Now it is an anachronism. Today you have a channel in the Net which gives us sound and importantly, abundant user experience of every piece of gear, not to mention tips on use and getting the best from it. The abundance of interviews belie the very ephemeral and frankly 'top of the head' nature of artists just promoting their latest product. And as for the ads... well, who has the deepest wallet speaks the loudest. Well done Warwick.

Move on... it's day is over, like the wider (rock) musical environment... 

P.S. regarding the lessons, there has never been more access to granular, virtuoso lessons on every aspect of bass playing... viva SBL..

[josie]

Perhaps I'm showing my age, but I don't want to need a screen and an internet connection for everything I want to do. I want something i can read on the train commuting to work, or in bed as I'm falling asleep, or put up on my music stand and try playing from without screen glare in my eyes. I want something I can take at my own pace without constantly taking one hand off the strings to hit the pause button. 

Yes it's good to have sound too, but that (imho) in no way means physical print media are an anachronism. 

Also, I've subscribed to BGM (UK) for some years now, and when the physical thing drops on my doormat, I pick it up and read it. Would I remember to go to a website once a month to see what was new? No. 

Is everything in it useful or even interesting? No. Is enough interesting or useful to justify the cost of the subscription? Yes. 

I'd call myself "intermediate" but still learn from @Steve Lawson's tutorials. 

[Steve Lawson]

My observation - from teaching and talking to an awful lot of bassists - is that the role that magazines played in terms of filling in historical knowledge isn't one that people are using the web for... It's weird, because YouTube is the greatest learning resource that humanity has ever come up with - whether you want to fix the screen on your phone, or work out what Allan Holdsworth was doing with symmetrical scales, there are SO many amazing lessons on there, but because the focus is on 'info that will benefit me right now' rather than the contained, delineated authoritative experience of reading an episodic magazine, it seems that relatively few people are spending time online digging into the history of the instrument. Reading BP cover to cover in the 90s (and reading every bass-related thing in Guitarist in the late 80s) was as much my school as the two years I did at music college. I have things I use every day in my playing that I learned from Rich Appleman's theory column in the 90s. I know about players because instead of, as has been indicated here, worrying that I didn't know who the players were, I read more voraciously when they were musicians I hadn't heard of than when it was ones I knew... So magazines were a way of accumulating knowledge... That was, in many ways, a problem, in that it meant that the writers and editors were the gatekeepers of knowledge, and as they were almost exclusively dudes (in the case of BP editors, all of them ever were men), women got WAY WAY worse coverage, and were often written about in a really shitty way. Likewise, the coverage was overwhelmingly US and Europe-centric. YouTube has its filters which provide similar levels of myopia if you use their algorithms to decide what to watch, but the capacity for learning is huge (I recently went on a Soca binge, and discovered a ton of amazing music and bass playing). 

...So, I'm still a fan of magazines - the economics of running a mag is way more perilous than a website, you can get away with more auto-generated content on a website and have zero print costs (hosting doesn't even come close in terms of monthly outgoing per reader), even though mags have a cover price - there's obviously no granularity to the reader spend. You don't get people who give you 5p a month for reading a page or two and some who pay the full price. It's all or nothing...

I greatly appreciate what No Treble are doing - particularly their attempts to fill that knowledge gap I suggested above - Ryan Madora's column on players to know is a really useful one, and the video tuition stuff is great - but the factors that drive virality, and therefor ad money, are far more damaging to so much web video content than perceived bias in reviews (there's SO much to say about reviewing, but my one observation would be that there is, objectively VERY little 'bad' gear out there now, above the rebadged absurdly cheap garbage on eBay from no-name manufacturers - the big players can't afford to make bad gear, and CNC means that consistency across instruments is lightyears beyond where it was 20 years ago when I was reviewing stuff for Bassist - I was regularly sent really bogus stuff, gave things mediocre reviews, and even refused to write about some stuff... It was way more useful to fill the pages with reviews of good stuff that I was to write a hit piece on some crappy gear. Ignore it, and it'll go away - at that point, magazines were the lifeblood of companies' ad strategy, so a bad review was actually more coverage than their rubbish gear deserved... But that's a whole other discussion) 

Anyway, decent journalism is expensive, so expensive that it makes a lot of magazines impossible to fund, and no commercial publisher is going to run a mag at a loss in order to meet readers' desires. The economics are a total mess right now. I'm really glad that we still have any print mags for bass at all, and I hope the people involved find a way to keep them going - my rate for writing in a UK bass mag is lower now than it was 20 years ago. They've cut everything back as far as it'll go, so we'll see if that's enough. I don't know the specifics of what was happening at BP, but I do know they ditched all their offices a while back and went to a remote working model to try and cut costs. I guess it wasn't enough. 

[Silvia Bluejay]

Spot on, Steve. Thanks.

[Mickeyboro]

Mags all the way for me!

[toneknob]

15 hours ago, josie said:

Perhaps I'm showing my age, but I don't want to need a screen and an internet connection for everything I want to do.

Likewise - I was commenting on the No Treble facebook about the transition and mentioned what I'd miss. (I think I've covered this here as well). The No Treble editor chimed in "Hey Tone you can get all of that on NT". I said you're right but I can't read No Treble in the bath. "You got me there pal".

 

[visog]

Just glanced at the latest issue on the stands... It's the UK mag with the US cover. Pretty dismal... advertising rag for Warwick... Oh! with a Jim Roberts column thrown in at the end.

[drTStingray]

I just received my copy - which seems to contain 75% of articles which have appeared very recently in BGM (eg John Deacon) - even down to the review of the Stingray 2018 Special being identical and carrying the same awful photos (miscoloured) that appeared in BGM. There are hundreds of them on Talkbass and Basschat that are better quality - and in case it escaped BGM they were already reviewed in BP magazine months ago without Mike Brooks' crazy moaning about the weight of a 5 string just over 9 pounds.

It sounds to me like the US subscribers may be less than pleased.

Perhaps Sylvia Bluejay could have a quiet word with the editorial team about quality issues 😉 👍 I used to enjoy both magazines for their different content and approaches - if one is going to be a slightly time warped copy of the other largely, then that is frankly abysmal. 

 

[The59Sound]

11 hours ago, visog said:

Just glanced at the latest issue on the stands... It's the UK mag with the US cover. Pretty dismal... advertising rag for Warwick... Oh! with a Jim Roberts column thrown in at the end.

So exactly like BGM 10 years ago? 😂

[petergales]

2 hours ago, drTStingray said:

I just received my copy - which seems to contain 75% of articles which have appeared very recently in BGM (eg John Deacon) - even down to the review of the Stingray 2018 Special being identical and carrying the same awful photos (miscoloured) that appeared in BGM. There are hundreds of them on Talkbass and Basschat that are better quality - and in case it escaped BGM they were already reviewed in BP magazine months ago without Mike Brooks' crazy moaning about the weight of a 5 string just over 9 pounds.

It sounds to me like the US subscribers may be less than pleased.

Perhaps Sylvia Bluejay could have a quiet word with the editorial team about quality issues 😉 👍 I used to enjoy both magazines for their different content and approaches - if one is going to be a slightly time warped copy of the other largely, then that is frankly abysmal. 

 

Couldn't agree more! BP is just a copy of BGM with different adverts. I had just renewed my subscription to BP as I also used to enjoy reading both magazines for their different content. I feel cheated. When I called Future Publishing to try to cancel my subscription to BP and claim some sort of refund I was told it wasn't one of their titles! That feels like daylight robbery and I'm pretty annoyed about it.

Anyone got any ideas about how I can get some money back?

[dmccombe7]

In late 70's / early 80's i used to get a mag called International Musician if i remember correctly with the hope of an interesting bass section. 

Then moved on to BGM but stopped buying it as i thought it was becoming a bit boring. 

I'd still buy if looking to buy new gear as the reviews could be quite helpful.

Looking forward to the revised version. 

[Sibob]

3 hours ago, petergales said:

Couldn't agree more! BP is just a copy of BGM with different adverts. I had just renewed my subscription to BP as I also used to enjoy reading both magazines for their different content. I feel cheated. When I called Future Publishing to try to cancel my subscription to BP and claim some sort of refund I was told it wasn't one of their titles! That feels like daylight robbery and I'm pretty annoyed about it.

Anyone got any ideas about how I can get some money back?

It is one of their titles, and so whoever told you that is mistaken (they may not have been aware of every title that was part of the merger). Call them again and talk to someone higher if necessary. I can’t imagine there will be any issue with getting a refund now it’s a duplicate publication (which was always the case when they announced it, no-one has been cheated).

Si

Edited December 8, 2018 by Sibob

[arthurhenry]

3 hours ago, petergales said:

6 hours ago, drTStingray said:

 

Couldn't agree more! BP is just a copy of BGM with different adverts.

Well yes; that's what it's supposed to be. There's been no effort to cover up the fact. It was nice to see Joel McIver acknowledge in his first editorial that BP is the "finest and most prestigious publication devoted solely to the low end." So why not rename the UK publication "Bass Player"? 

[petergales]

2 hours ago, Sibob said:

It is one of their titles, and so whoever told you that is mistaken (they may not have been aware of every title that was part of the merger). Call them again and talk to someone higher if necessary. I can’t imagine there will be any issue with getting a refund now it’s a duplicate publication (which was always the case when they announced it, no-one has been cheated).

Si

I spoke to a guy called McGlorian. When he was adamant it wasn't one of his publications I asked to speak to his boss but apparently he was busy but promised to call me back. Needless to say he hasn't. I'll give it another go on Monday. 

[lowdowner]

A lot of people on this thread, and on previous ones, have suggested that there is a lot of this kind of content online, and it's 'better' etc. I would really appreciate a few links so I could take a look and get my bass discussion and review fix from somewhere online (in addition to this site of course!)

Anyone want to volunteer any links?